I've made various comments to other people's responses, so I guess it is time to actually respond to the PEP itself.
On Sun, 13 May 2007 17:44:39 +0200, Martin v. Löwis wrote: > PEP 1 specifies that PEP authors need to collect feedback from the > community. As the author of PEP 3131, I'd like to encourage comments to > the PEP included below, either here (comp.lang.python), or to > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > In summary, this PEP proposes to allow non-ASCII letters as identifiers > in Python. If the PEP is accepted, the following identifiers would also > become valid as class, function, or variable names: Löffelstiel, changé, > ошибка, or 売り場 (hoping that the latter one means "counter"). > > I believe this PEP differs from other Py3k PEPs in that it really > requires feedback from people with different cultural background to > evaluate it fully - most other PEPs are culture-neutral. > > So, please provide feedback, e.g. perhaps by answering these questions: > - should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why? - would you use them > if it was possible to do so? in what cases? It seems to me that none of the objections to non-ASCII identifiers are particularly strong. I've heard many accusations that they will introduce "vulnerabilities", by analogy to unicode attacks in URLs, but I haven't seen any credible explanations of how these vulnerabilities would work, or how they are any different to existing threats. That's not to say that there isn't a credible threat, but if there is, nobody has come close to explaining it. I would find it useful to be able to use non-ASCII characters for heavily mathematical programs. There would be a closer correspondence between the code and the mathematical equations if one could write Δ(µ*π) instead of delta(mu*pi). (Aside: I wonder what the Numeric crowd would say about this?) -- Steven. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
