John Nagle wrote: > There are really two issues here, and they're being > confused. > > One is allowing non-English identifiers, which is a political > issuer. The other is homoglyphs, two characters which look the same. > The latter is a real problem in a language like Python with implicit > declarations. If a maintenance programmer sees a variable name > and retypes it, they may silently create a new variable. > > If Unicode characters are allowed, they must be done under some > profile restrictive enough to prohibit homoglyphs. I'm not sure > if UTS-39, profile 2, "Highly Restrictive", solves this problem, > but it's a step in the right direction. This limits mixing of scripts > in a single identifier; you can't mix Hebrew and ASCII, for example, > which prevents problems with mixing right to left and left to right > scripts. Domain names have similar restrictions. > > We have to have visually unique identifiers.
As others stated before, this is unlikely to become a problem in practice. Project-internal standards will usually define a specific language for a project, in which case these issues will not arise. In general, programmers from a specific language/script background will stick to that script and not magically start typing foreign characters. And projects where multiple languages are involved will have to define a target language anyway, most likely (although not necessarily) English. Note that adherence to a specific script can easily checked programmatically through Unicode ranges - if the need ever arises. Stefan -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
