Python's 8-bit cleanness deprecated?

[M.-A. Lemburg]

Roman Suzi wrote:
> [Skip Montanaro]
> 
>>This is another thread that's wandered off into tit-for-tat hell.  Can we
>>please just drop it and move on?
> 
> 
> As the OP of the thread, I feel obliged to summarize it.
> 
> We discussed PEP-0263
> ( http://python.org/peps/pep-0263.html )
> 
> 1. Opinions were divided on the necessity for adding encoding
> comment for non-ASCII encodings (in fact, non-utf-8 encodings).
> 
> There were many arguments pro and contra and (it seems) there are
> more people who support PEP 263 than those who do not.
> Arguments were:
> 
> + explicit encoding disciplines programmer
> + it is portable
> + it allows editors such as Emacs, vim and SciTe to be informed on encoding
> 
> - it's annoying for beginners
> - it irritates those who want to run old scripts with new Python
>   (phase 1 gives warning, phase 2 will give errors!)
> - it makes one encoding per source a must, disallowing 
>   any non-standart de-facto usages of encoding mixtures
> - it's ugly
> 
> 2. The last "minus" was discussed further. Many syntactic
>   suggestions were made (read the thread)
> 
> * Further discussion is probably not constructive, as Skip noticed.

Indeed :-) Even less, since it is already implemented in Python 2.3.

> Encoding-cookie is bitter, but probably necessary. I have no other
> arguments. 
> 
> However, nobody answered how one would feel if 
> # -*- coding: ascii -*- 
> would be necessary for every program.

-- 
Marc-Andre Lemburg
CEO eGenix.com Software GmbH
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