[Python-3000] Offtopic: declaring encoding

[Marcin 'Qrczak' Kowalczyk]

"Paul Prescod" <paul at prescod.net> writes:

> text data cannot even be reliably processed on the desktop on which
> it was created (yes, even on Unix: look back in this thread).

Where?

> Do you have a positive prescription?

New communication protocols and newly created file formats designed
for interchange will either specify the text encoding in metadata
(if files are expected to be edited by hand and it's still a near future),
or use UTF-8 exclusively. Simple file formats expected to be used only
locally will continue to have the encoding implicit.

The system encoding of Unix boxes will more commonly be UTF-8 as time
passes.

I'm not using UTF-8 on my desktop by default because there are still
some applications which don't work with UTF-8 terminals. The situation
is much better than it used to be 10 years ago: most applications
didn't support UTF-8 back then, now most do.

-- 
   __("<         Marcin Kowalczyk
   \__/       qrczak at knm.org.pl
    ^^     http://qrnik.knm.org.pl/~qrczak/