[Python-Dev] default encoding for 8-bit string literals (was Unicode and comparisons)

[Guido van Rossum]

> u"..." currently interprets the characters it finds as Latin-1
> (this is by design, since the first 256 Unicode ordinals map to
> the Latin-1 characters).

Nice, except that now we seem to be ambiguous about the source
character encoding: it's Latin-1 for Unicode strings and UTF-8 for
8-bit strings...!

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)