Steven D'Aprano wrote: > 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. Lo:wis 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: Lo:ffelstiel, change, > > oshibka, or ***ri*** (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 D(u*p) instead of > delta(mu*pi).
Just as one risk here: When reading the above on Google groups, it showed up as "if one could write ?(u*p)..." When quoting it for response, it showed up as "could write D(u*p)". I'm sure that the symbol you used was neither a capital letter d nor a question mark. Using identifiers that are so prone to corruption when posting in a rather popular forum seems dangerous to me--and I'd guess that a lot of source code highlighters, email lists, etc have similar problems. I'd even be surprised if some programming tools didn't have similar problems. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
