Python's 8-bit cleanness deprecated?

[Roman Suzi]

[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.

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.


Sincerely yours, Roman Suzi
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