On Sun, 2007-05-13 at 21:01 +0200, Stefan Behnel wrote: > For example, I could write > > def zieheDreiAbVon(wert): > return zieheAb(wert, 3) > > and most people on earth would not have a clue what this is good for. However, > someone who is fluent enough in German could guess from the names what this > does. > > I do not think non-ASCII characters make this 'problem' any worse. So I must > ask people to restrict their comments to the actual problem that this PEP is > trying to solve.
I think non-ASCII characters makes the problem far far worse. While I may not understand what the function is by it's name in your example, allowing non-ASCII characters makes it works by forcing all would-be code readers have to have all kinds of necessary fonts just to view the source code. Things like reporting exceptions too. At least in your example I know the exception occurred in zieheDreiAbVon. But if that identifier is some UTF-8 string, how do I go about finding it in my text editor, or even reporting the message to the developers? I don't happen to have that particular keymap installed in my linux system, so I can't even type the letters! So given that people can already transliterate their language for use as identifiers, I think avoiding non-ASCII character sets is a good idea. ASCII is simply the lowest denominator and is support by *all* configurations and locales on all developers' systems. > > Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
