[Python-Dev] directive statement (PEP 244)

[Skip Montanaro]

Please excuse the naive interruption to this discussion.  

I'm a bit removed from this debate, being someone who is generally happy
with ASCII (and who really doesn't understand all the fur that is flying),
however I would imagine that programmers in Moscow writing code to be read
by other Russian programmers would want to enter Cyrillic characters
directly into their module doc strings and not have to insert hex escapes.
Can they safely do that now if they set the encoding variable in site.py
appropriately?  If so, what is the need for the proposed directive to set
encodings?  Is it an attempt simply to allow different encodings on a
per-module basis?

On a related note, can the "Defining Unicode Literal Encodings" PEP be added
to the PEP site/page so those of us who don't save every message that flows
into their inboxes have it to refer to?

Thx,

Skip