[Doc-SIG] non-ascii docstrings

[Laura Creighton]

I have never seen a module where the -*- coding -*- is not the same as
the docstring, either.  And the greatest number of times I have seen
this is where people are using some company-wide tool, possibly
third-party and possibly to integrate with java code -- to extract
the docstrings, and also have a requirement that the docstring
contains the name of the person who wrote, and or modified the code.

Indeed, in the matter of encoding, I wish that python would guess 
a whole lot more.  One of the most common 'first python programs'
that non-computer people write is 'my phonelist manager' and another is
'my cd collection manager'.  I think that they have plenty enough
to worry about without needing to find out about encodings before 
their first python program runs.  Most places _have_ a locale sort
of setting, and I would be in favour of trying whatever is there
when encountering something that is not ascii.

Laura