Re: PEP 3131: Supporting Non-ASCII Identifiers

On Wed, 16 May 2007 12:22:01 +0200, Neil Hodgson <nyamatongwe+thunder@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Eric Brunel:

... there is no keyboard *on Earth* allowing to type *all* characters in the whole Unicode set.

My keyboard in conjunction with the operating system (US English keyboard on a Windows XP system) allows me to type characters from any language. I haven't learned how to type these all quickly but I can get through a session of testing Japanese input by myself. Its a matter of turning on different keyboard layouts through the "Text Services and Input Languages" control panel. Then there are small windows called Input Method Editors that provide a mapping from your input to the target language. Other platforms provide similar services.

Funny you talk about Japanese, a language I'm a bit familiar with and for which I actually know some input methods. The thing is, these only work if you know the transcription to the latin alphabet of the word you want to type, which closely match its pronunciation. So if you don't know that 売り 場 is pronounced "uriba" for example, you have absolutely no way of entering the word. Even if you could choose among a list of characters, are you aware that there are almost 2000 "basic" Chinese characters used in the Japanese language? And if I'm not mistaken, there are several tens of thousands characters in the Chinese language itself. This makes typing them virtually impossible if you don't know the language and/or have the correct keyboard.
--
python -c "print ''.join([chr(154 - ord(c)) for c in 'U(17zX(%,5.zmz5(17l8(%,5.Z*(93-965$l7+-'])"
.

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