Some Unicode in identifiers improperly rejected

[JoshuaLandau]

BPO	16010
Nosy	@bitdancer

^{Note: these values reflect the state of the issue at the time it was migrated and might not reflect the current state.}

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GitHub fields:

assignee = None
closed_at = <Date 2012-09-24.01:40:36.990>
created_at = <Date 2012-09-23.23:45:22.252>
labels = ['interpreter-core', 'invalid']
title = 'Some Unicode in identifiers improperly rejected'
updated_at = <Date 2012-09-25.21:08:15.260>
user = 'https://bugs.python.org/JoshuaLandau'

bugs.python.org fields:

activity = <Date 2012-09-25.21:08:15.260>
actor = 'terry.reedy'
assignee = 'none'
closed = True
closed_date = <Date 2012-09-24.01:40:36.990>
closer = 'r.david.murray'
components = ['Interpreter Core']
creation = <Date 2012-09-23.23:45:22.252>
creator = 'Joshua.Landau'
dependencies = []
files = []
hgrepos = []
issue_num = 16010
keywords = []
message_count = 2.0
messages = ['171082', '171089']
nosy_count = 2.0
nosy_names = ['r.david.murray', 'Joshua.Landau']
pr_nums = []
priority = 'normal'
resolution = 'not a bug'
stage = 'resolved'
status = 'closed'
superseder = None
type = None
url = 'https://bugs.python.org/issue16010'
versions = ['Python 3.2']

[JoshuaLandau]

"a¹ = None" is not valid, even though unicodedata.normalize("NFKC", "¹") == "1".

One would expect "a¹ = None" and "a1 = None" to be equivalent in this case, as with "aⁱ = None" and "ai = None".

I am not sure how many other characters exhibit the same problem.

References:
http://docs.python.org/py3k/reference/lexical_analysis.html#identifiers
http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-list/2012-September/631420.html

"¹" === "\u00b9"
"ⁱ" === "\u2071"

[bitdancer]

I find it unexpected that aⁱ and ai name the same variable, but I suppose that is a consequence of the unicode normalization rules (meaning what I really find surprising is the normalization).

As for the '¹', its category is No, which does not appear in the list in the identifiers section you link to, while 'ⁱ' is Lm, which does.

So there is no bug here.