PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

[Stefan Behnel]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch schrieb:

In <mn.74c37d75c02 f9f3d.34209@mcl aveauPas.De.Spa m.com>, Michel Claveau
wrote:
>

>And Il1 O0 ?

>
Hm, we should ban digits from identifier names. :-)

Ah, good idea - and capital letters also. After all, they are rare enough in
English to just plain ignore their existance.

Stefan :)

[Grant Edwards]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

On 2007-05-14, Stefan Behnel <stefan.behne l-n05pAM@web.dewr ote:

Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch schrieb:

>In <mn.74c37d75c02 f9f3d.34209@mcl aveauPas.De.Spa m.com>, Michel Claveau
>wrote:
>>

>>And Il1 O0 ?

>>
>Hm, we should ban digits from identifier names. :-)

>
Ah, good idea - and capital letters also. After all, they are
rare enough in English to just plain ignore their existance.

And I don't really see any need for using more than two
characters. With just two letters (ignoring case, of course),
you can create 676 identifiers in any namespace. That's
certainly got to be enough. If not, adding a special caracter
suffix (e.g. $,%,#) to denote the data type should sufficient
expand the namespace.

So, let's just silently ignore anything past the first two.
That way we'd be compatible with Commodor PET Basic.

[You don't want to know how long it took me to find all of the
name-collision bugs after porting a basic program from a CP/M
system which had a fairly sophisticated Basic compiler (no line
numbers, all the normal structured programming flow control
constructs) to a Commodore PET which had a really crappy BASIC
interpreter.]

--
Grant Edwards grante Yow! Am I having fun yet?
at
visi.com

[=?UTF-8?Q?M=C3=A9ta-MCI?=]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Hi!

- should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why?
- would you use them if it was possible to do so? in what cases?

Yes.

JScript can use letters with accents in identifiers
XML (1.1) can use letters with accents in tags
C# can use letters with accents in variables
SQL: MySQL/MS-Sql/Oralcle/etc. can use accents in fields or request
etc.
etc.

Python MUST make up for its lost time.


MCI

[Jakub Stolarski]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

On May 14, 9:49 pm, Méta-MCI <enleverlesX.X. ..@XmclaveauX.c omwrote:

Hi!
>
- should non-ASCII identifiers be supported? why?
- would you use them if it was possible to do so? in what cases?
>
Yes.
>
JScript can use letters with accents in identifiers
XML (1.1) can use letters with accents in tags
C# can use letters with accents in variables
SQL: MySQL/MS-Sql/Oralcle/etc. can use accents in fields or request
etc.
etc.
>
Python MUST make up for its lost time.
>
MCI

And generally nobody use it.
It sounds like "are for art's sake".

But OK. Maybe it'll be some impulse to learn some new languages.

+1 for this PEP

[=?UTF-8?B?Ik1hcnRpbiB2LiBMw7Z3aXMi?=]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

In <slrnf4gafq.v74 .nick@irishsea. home.craig-wood.com>, Nick Craig-Wood

wrote:
>

>My initial reaction is that it would be cool to use all those great
>symbols. A variable called OHM etc!

>
This is a nice candidate for homoglyph confusion. There's the Greek
letter omega (U+03A9) Ω and the SI unit symbol (U+2126) Ω, and I think
some omegas in the mathematical symbols area too.

Under the PEP, identifiers are converted to normal form NFC, and
we have

pyunicodedata.n ormalize("NFC", u"\u2126")
u'\u03a9'

So, OHM SIGN compares equal to GREEK CAPITAL LETTER OMEGA. It can't
be confused with it - it is equal to it by the proposed language
semantics.

Regards,
Martin

[=?UTF-8?B?Ik1hcnRpbiB2LiBMw7Z3aXMi?=]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Not providing an explicit listing of allowed characters is inexcusable

sloppiness.

That is a deliberate part of the specification. It is intentional that
it does *not* specify a precise list, but instead defers that list
to the version of the Unicode standard used (in the unicodedata
module).

The XML standard is an example of how listings of large parts of the
Unicode character set can be provided clearly, exactly and (almost)
concisely.

And, indeed, this is now recognized as one of the bigger mistakes
of the XML recommendation: they provide an explicit list, and fail
to consider characters that are unassigned. In XML 1.1, they try
to address this issue, by now allowing unassigned characters in
XML names even though it's not certain yet what those characters
mean (until they are assigned).

>``ID_Continue` ` is defined as all characters in ``ID_Start``, plus
>nonspacing marks (Mn), spacing combining marks (Mc), decimal number
>(Nd), and connector punctuations (Pc).

>
Am I the first to notice how unsuitable these characters are?

Probably. Nobody in the Unicode consortium noticed, but what
do they know about suitability of Unicode characters...

Regards,
Martin

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Martin_v=2E_L=F6wis=22?=]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Neil Hodgson schrieb:

Paul Rubin wrote:

>>Plenty of programming languages already support unicode identifiers,

>>
>Could you name a few? Thanks.

>
C#, Java, Ecmascript, Visual Basic.

Specification-wise, C99 and C++98 also support Unicode identifiers,
although many compilers still don't.

For dynamic languages, Groovy also supports it.

Regards,
Martin

[Neil Hodgson]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Martin v. Löwis:

Specification-wise, C99 and C++98 also support Unicode identifiers,
although many compilers still don't.

Ada 2005 allows Unicode identifiers and even includes the constant
'Ï€' in Ada.Numerics.

Neil

[Paul Rubin]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Stefan Behnel <stefan.behne l-n05pAM@web.dewr ites:

But then, where's the problem? Just stick to accepting only patches that are
plain ASCII *for your particular project*.

There is no feature that has ever been proposed for Python, that cannot
be supported with this argument. If you don't like having a "go to"
statement added to Python, where's the problem? Just don't use it in
your particular project.

[ZeD]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Neil Hodgson wrote:

Ada 2005 allows Unicode identifiers and even includes the constant
'?' in Ada.Numerics.

this. is. cool.

(oh, and +1 for the pep)

--
Under construction

[=?ISO-8859-1?Q?=22Martin_v=2E_L=F6wis=22?=]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Paul Rubin schrieb:

>Plenty of programming languages already support unicode identifiers,

>
Could you name a few? Thanks.

The GNU assembler also supports non-ASCII symbol names on object file
formats that support it; this includes at least ELF (not sure about
PE32). Higher-level programming languages can use that to encode symbols
in UTF-8.

Regards,
Martin

[Stefan Behnel]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Paul Rubin wrote:

Stefan Behnel <stefan.behne l-n05pAM@web.dewr ites:

>But then, where's the problem? Just stick to accepting only patches that are
>plain ASCII *for your particular project*.

>
There is no feature that has ever been proposed for Python, that cannot
be supported with this argument. If you don't like having a "go to"
statement added to Python, where's the problem? Just don't use it in
your particular project.

"go to" is not meant for clarity, nor does it encourage code readability.

But that's what this PEP is about.

Stefan

[Stefan Behnel]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

Paul Rubin wrote:

Stefan Behnel <stefan.behne l-n05pAM@web.dewr ites:

>But then, where's the problem? Just stick to accepting only patches that are
>plain ASCII *for your particular project*.

>
There is no feature that has ever been proposed for Python, that cannot
be supported with this argument. If you don't like having a "go to"
statement added to Python, where's the problem? Just don't use it in
your particular project.

"go to" is not meant for clarity, nor does it encourage code readability.

But that's what this PEP is about.

Stefan

[Eric Brunel]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

On Mon, 14 May 2007 18:30:42 +0200, <rurpy@yahoo.co mwrote:
[snip]

Can a discussion about support for non-english identifiers (1)
conducted in a group where 99.9% of the posters are fluent
speakers of english (2), have any chance of being objective
or fair?

Agreed.

Although probably not-sufficient to overcome this built-in
bias, it would be interesting if some bi-lingual readers would
raise this issue in some non-english Python discussion
groups to see if the opposition to this idea is as strong
there as it is here.

Done on the french Python newsgroup.
--
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in
'U(17zX(%,5.zmz 5(17l8(%,5.Z*(9 3-965$l7+-'])"

[Eric Brunel]

Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

On Tue, 15 May 2007 07:15:21 +0200, ZeD <vito.detullio@ gmail.comwrote:

Neil Hodgson wrote:
>

> Ada 2005 allows Unicode identifiers and even includes the constant
>'?' in Ada.Numerics.

^^^

this. is. cool.

Yeah, right... The problems begin...

Joke aside, this just means that I won't ever be able to program math in
ADA, because I have absolutely no idea on how to do a 'pi' character on my
keyboard.

Still -1 for the PEP...
--
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in
'U(17zX(%,5.zmz 5(17l8(%,5.Z*(9 3-965$l7+-'])"