Hi Robert, On 3 Mrz., 22:48, Robert Bradshaw <rober...@math.washington.edu> wrote: > 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.
So, a useful definition would be to restrict to ASCII identifiers (no unicode), but allow the use of ASCII letters (meaning: being a letter in the alphabet of some natural language) that do not range from a-z and A-Z? > 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. That makes sense. I don't know what Python 3.x does, though. It was not clear to me from PEP 3131 whether this is part of Python 3. > Of course there's the issue of passing > them around to all the backends like maxima, and var("α") == > var("alpha"). I doubt that we want to have var("α") == var("alpha"). Passing stuff to backends is indeed something one has to think about. But I wonder whether the whole discussion is futile before being based on Python 3: Even if you define var("α"), you would not be able to use it under the name α, simply because Python 2.x does not allow the identifier α --- so, before Python 3, we are hardly in the position to allow var("α") (it seems to me that the whole point of var(...) is to insert stuff into the global name space). sage: var("α") α sage: α ------------------------------------------------------------ File "<ipython console>", line 1 α ^ SyntaxError: invalid syntax Best regards, Simon -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org