"M.-A. Lemburg" <mal@lemburg.com> writes:
It was planned for 2.3 several months ago. The fact that it isn't in there yet is mostly my fault: I didn't have time to cook up a patch and forgot to ask here for other volunteers.
You mean, this was your plan? I am not aware of such a plan, and it is not part of the approved PEP 263. I would strongly object to such a change.
This feature is needed to calm down concerns of non-ASCII Python users who want to customize Python to better suit their needs for both educational and production use purposes.
People who want such a feature will have to fork Python. However, most users will accept to put encoding declarations into their source code. They will curse, and then they will get over it. Regards, Martin