On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 1:23 PM, Simon King <simon.k...@uni-jena.de> wrote:
> Hi Robert,
>
> On 3 Mrz., 20:02, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu>
> wrote:
>> On Thu, Mar 3, 2011 at 2:52 AM, Simon King <simon.k...@uni-jena.de> wrote:
>> > Hi Burcin and all,
>>
>> > On 2 Mrz., 17:36, Burcin Erocal <bur...@erocal.org> wrote:
>> >> People might want to use utf-8 strings which won't be valid under that
>> >> condition. See #7496:
>>
>> >>http://trac.sagemath.org/sage_trac/ticket/7496
>> ...
>> -100 for valid identifiers/sage variable names to be a function of the
>> users locality.
>
> Then you should comment on #7496, where it is stated that users should
> *still* be able to use the greek letter α (not the word "alpha") as a
> variable name, and which refers to PEP 3131 (Supporting Non-ASCII
> Identifiers).
>
> But if we agree on disallowing the use of common letters like ä, ö, ü,
> é, α and decide to postpone the support until Sage uses Python 3.x,
> then things would indeed become quite easy. It is just a simple
> regular expression for testing whether a name is an identifier, a test
> whether a name is a reserved keyword, plus splitting of a string at
> commas and whitespace, in such a way that var('a,b,c') has the same
> result as var(' a, b c,').
I think allowing letters like ç is just fine, what I'm opposed to is
letting our definition of valid symbol names vary from platform to
platform and local to local. If we're to allow non-ASCII identifiers,
I'd suggest we backport what Python 3.x does rather than coming up
with our own specification. Of course there's the issue of passing
them around to all the backends like maxima, and var("α") ==
var("alpha").
- Robert
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