Hello, I'm also a long-time Japanese Python user.

Thanks for writing! I promise you that we won't hurry to check in the PEP until we have thoroughly examined your objection. Since encodings are much more important for your country than for most western countries, it would be a mistake if we added a feature that had the opposite effect for you as intended!

In this case, I don't think you made a mistake. While Suzuki screamed around the Japanese Python mailing list about this topic, I cannot recall messages agree with him.

For this reason, I find it hard to believe that people really set the Python default encoding in site.py to "utf-16". Maybe I'm wrong -- or maybe you're talking about a different default encoding?

This point was told in the Japanese mailing list, but no one cared about this. It can cause a problem, but I don't think it really happens.

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From my experiences, inserting the '-*- coding: <coding name> -*-' line into an existing file and converting such a file into UTF-8 are almost the same amount of work.

Yes, for those people who have a UTF-8 toolchain set up. I expect that many Europeans don't have one handy, because their needs are met by Latin-1.

Many Japanese don't have such tools, also.

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We will be glad if Python understands Japanese (and other) characters by default (by adopting, say, UTF-8 as default).

I think that in the future, we be able to change the default to UTF-8. Picking ASCII as the "official" default has the advantage that it will let us switch to UTF-8 in the future, when we feel that there is enough support for UTF-8 in the average computer system.

Agreed, we will be able to move to UTF-8 someday, but not today. -------------------------- Atsuo Ishimoto ishimoto@gembook.org Homepage:http://www.gembook.jp