On Sun, 13 May 2007 15:35:15 -0700, Alex Martelli wrote: > Homoglyphic characters _introduced by accident_ should not be discounted > as a risk ... > But when something similar > happens to somebody using a sufficiently fancy text editor to input > source in a programming language allowing arbitrary Unicode letters in > identifiers, the damage (the sheer waste of developer time) can be much > more substantial -- there will be two separate identifiers around, both > looking exactly like each other but actually distinct, and unbounded > amount of programmer time can be spent chasing after this extremely > elusive and tricky bug -- why doesn't a rebinding appear to "take", etc. > With some copy-and-paste during development and attempts at debugging, > several copies of each distinct version of the identifier can be spread > around the code, further hampering attempts at understanding.
How is that different from misreading "disk_burnt = True" as "disk_bumt = True"? In the right (or perhaps wrong) font, like the ever-popular Arial, the two can be visually indistinguishable. Or "call" versus "cal1"? Surely the correct solution is something like pylint or pychecker? Or banning the use of lower-case L and digit 1 in identifiers. I'm good with both. -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
