[Greg E]
That would break a lot of programs that use pickle without opening the file in binary mode.
[Guido]
Really? That's unfortunate.
[Greg E]
Unfortunate, yes, and true, as far as I can see. It bit me recently -- I decided to change something to use binary pickling, and forgot to change the way I was opening the file.
If you must do this, I suppose you could start issuing warnings if pickling is done without specifying a mode, and then change the default later.
I thought of that. But probably not worth the upheaval.
If there's a way of making non-binary unpickling dramatically faster, though -- even if only with cPickle -- that would be a *big* win, and shouldn't cause any compatibity problems.
python/sf/505705 is close to acceptance, and reduced one particularly slow unpickling example 6-fold in speed. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)