PyWart: PEP8: A cauldron of inconsistencies.

[Chris Angelico]

On Thu, Jul 28, 2011 at 8:34 AM, rantingrick <rantingrick at gmail.com> wrote:
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>> Encodings (PEP 263)
>>
>> Code in the core Python distribution should always use the
>> ASCII or Latin-1 encoding (a.k.a. ISO-8859-1).  For Python
>> 3.0 and beyond, UTF-8 is preferred over Latin-1, see PEP
>> 3120.
>> ----------------------------------------------------------
>
> no, NO, NO!. We should never be writing source in ANYTHING besides
> ASCII. Can you offer any "good reason" why we should? No, because
> there are no good reasons. This is just more fluffy feel good crap and
> it makes me sick! Are we trying to keep xah happy? I know he likes
> Unicode.

There's nothing wrong with using UTF-8 for source files. It means that:
a) Unicode string literals can incorporate copied-and-pasted Unicode
characters (assuming the editor knows to save with the right
encoding), instead of forcing them to be translated into \uXXXX
notation; and
b) identifiers are not limited to the ASCII character set.

There's no reason to deny either of these. Rick, you're welcome to
stay in the US and never send any code to the rest of the world, but
some of us do.

ChrisA