I was wondering if it might be reasonable to consider adding a set of Greek letters to the constants in the `string` module. In my mind, the format would follow the existing convention—constants for both `greek_lowercase` and `greek_uppercase`, as well as a combined constant `greek_letters`.
Judging by how these constants are defined in the module, this seems like it might be an almost trivially easy addition (with minimal future maintenance required), and could provide a neat little functionality. Where Python 3 already uses unicode strings, I don't believe this would cause any backward compatibility issues. The only one drawback I can see might be polluting the namespace if it is not a commonly used feature. That said, the Greek alphabet is used so commonly in math/science that I'd hazard a guess it might be valuable for some, especially as unicode becomes increasingly prevalent. Obviously developers could build their own similar constant just by creating a string with those characters, but this would save a step, whether that's adding a dependency or copying/pasting a handful of characters. I also anticipate that the argument may come up that this opens a can of worms, and then why not include even more symbols. I think that is a valid concern, though I think the Greek alphabet is somewhat unique in it's prevalence (due to it's use in math/science), on top of the fact that it is both limited and permanent (in a way that things like logograms and emojis may not be). I'm certainly not an expert on the Python source code though, so please correct me if there's an obvious reason not to add this or if this has been debated before :) _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list -- [email protected] To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected] https://mail.python.org/mailman3/lists/python-ideas.python.org/ Message archived at https://mail.python.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/STABL2VLT2XQV3XO6S7OBVAABJR6QVEN/ Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
