Rauli Ruohonen writes: > There are some cases where users might in the future want to make > a distinction between "compatibility" characters, such as these: > http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mathematical_alphanumeric_symbols
I don't think they belong in identifiers in a general purpose programming language, though their usefulness to mathematical printers is obvious. I think programs should be verbalizable, unlike math where most of the text is not intended to correspond to any reality, but is purely syntactic transformation. > For this reason I think that compatibility transformation, if any, > should only be applied to characters where there's a practical > reason to do so, and for other cases punting (=syntax error) is > safest. "Banzai Python!" and all that, but even if Python is in use 10,000 years from now, I think compatibility characters will still be a YAGNI. I admit that's a reasonable compromise, and allows future extension without gratuitously making existing programs illegal; I could live with it very easily (but I'd want those full-width ASCII decomposed :-). I just feel it would be wiser to limit Python identifiers to NFKC. > I use two Japanese input methods (MS IME and scim/anthy), but only the > latter one daily. When I type text that mixes Japanese and other > For code that uses a lot of Japanese this may not be convenient, > but then you'd want to set your input method to use ASCII for ASCII > anyway, Both of those address the issue of the annoyance of syntax errors in original code to a great extent, but not in debug/maintenance mode where you only type a few characters of code at a time, and typically enter from user mode. > You have to go out of your way to type halfwidth katakana, and it > isn't really useful in identifiers IMHO. I agree, but then I don't work for the Japanese Social Security Administration. _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
