[Python-Dev] PEP 263 considered faulty (for some Japanese)

[Guido van Rossum]

> My position on this is *not* to introduce more defaults -- explicit
> is better than implicit and in this particular case (encodings) 
> it'll result in a net win.

I'd like to believe you.  But the fact that apparently there are
Japanese users who are willing to give up part of the language and
library just so they can have an certain default, suggests that
the need for defaults is a strong force.  Maybe we would've been
better off leaving sys.setdefaultencoding() enabled -- then those
people might have put sys.setdefaultencoding("utf-16") at the top of
their program rather than hacking site.py... :-(

> > In the light of the post by Atsuo Ishimoto and the responses from both
> > Marc-Andre Lemburg and Martin von Loewis, however, I'm not sure
> > whether Suziki Hisao's response represents the Japanese community, and
> > it's possible that nothing needs to be done.
> 
> Well, users using non-ASCII coding in their source files
> should start to be explicit about the encoding (in phase 1
> they'll get a warning printed which makes them aware of the 
> problem), but other than that, I don't see a need for 
> changes to the strategy.

Suzuki won't get the warning, because his source files are pure ASCII
-- but his Unicode string literals will be interpreted as utf-16,
which will break his programs.  The question is, do we care about him
and others like him, or do we decide that their habits are bad for
them and they have to change them?

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