On Fri, Jun 02, 2017 at 04:29:16PM -0700, Guido van Rossum wrote: > Are those characters not considered Unicode letters? Maybe we could add > their category to the allowed set?
They're not letters: py> {unicodedata.category(c) for c in '∑√∫∞'} {'Sm'} That's Symbol, Math. One problem is that the 'Sm' category includes a whole lot of mathematical symbols that we probably don't want in identifiers: ∴ ∣ ≈ ≒ ≝ ≫ ≮ ⊞ (plus MANY more variations on = < and > operators) including some "Confusables": ∁ ∊ ∨ ∗ ∑ etc C ε v * Σ http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr39/ Of course a language can define identifiers however it likes, but I think it is relevant that the Unicode Consortium's default algorithm for determining an identifier excludes Sm. http://www.unicode.org/reports/tr31/ I also disagree with Ivan that these symbols would be particularly useful in general, even for maths-heavy code, although I wouldn't say no to special casing ∞ (infinity) and maybe √ as a unary square root operator. -- Steve _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/