default setting of unicode set

[Martin v. Loewis]

Boudewijn Rempt <boud at valdyas.org> writes:

> That sounds very fine -- but the problem is, it's so counter-intuitive,
> that every newcomer will stumble over this. I just noticed another posting
> on this topic... Having to use codects.open instead of the builtin is just
> as bad. People will start using plain open, waste a few days trying to find
> out why it doesn't work, and then perhaps discover the codecs module. 

The alternative seems much worse: people will change the system
default encoding because they are told to do so, without really
understanding what that is.

Then, they will write garbage data to files, because they won't get
exceptions anymore about incorrect type conversions.

This is like saying that you want to change "1"+2 not returning a type
error anymore, since it is inconvient to write "1"+str(2) (or
int("1")+2).

Regards,
Martin