On Tue, 2007-05-15 at 18:18 +0200, René Fleschenberg wrote: > Carsten Haese schrieb: > > Allowing people to use identifiers in their native language would > > definitely be an advantage for people from such cultures. That's the use > > case for this PEP. It's easy for Euro-centric people to say "just suck > > it up and use ASCII", but the same people would probably starve to death > > if they were suddenly teleported from Somewhere In Europe to rural China > > which is so unimaginably different from what they know that it might > > just as well be a different planet. "Learn English and use ASCII" is not > > generally feasible advice in such cultures. > > This is a very weak argument, IMHO. How do you want to use Python > without learning at least enough English to grasp a somewhat decent > understanding of the standard library? Let's face it: To do any "real" > programming, you need to know at least some English today, and I don't > see that changing anytime soon. And it is definitely not going to be > changed by allowing non-ASCII identifiers.
Even if it were impossible to do "real programming" in Python without knowing English (which I will neither accept nor reject because I don't have enough data either way), I don't think Python should be restricted to "real" programming only. Python (the programming language) is an inherently easy-to-learn language. I find it quite plausible that somebody in China might want to teach their students programming before teaching them English. The posts on this thread by a teacher from China confirm this suspicion. Once the students learn Python and realize that there are lots of Python resources "out there" that are only in English, that will be a motivation for them to learn English. Requiring all potential Python programmers to learn English first (or assuming that they know English already) is an unacceptable barrier of entry. -- Carsten Haese http://informixdb.sourceforge.net -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list