Nick Coghlan added the comment: Metaclasses and monkeypatching encourage bad API design, too, but we still provide them because they're essential tools for some use cases. In Python, the system integrator is always right, and we provide them with power tools to deal with the cases where reality doesn't want to cooperate with the nice neat model of the world that we provide by default.
For the standard streams, the problem is that the stream is created automatically by the interpreter, and sometimes we will get the encoding choice wrong (because the info we retrieve from the OS doesn't match what the user actually wants), but rebinding the names to a new IO stream causes other problems. Now, we have two choices at this point: 1. Assume there is *no other API involving implicit text stream creation in any third party Python 3 library anywhere* that will ever have this problem and create a solution that only works with the standard streams 2. Acknowledge that while the implicit way we create the standard streams is unusual, it is unlikely to be *unique*, so it actually does make sense to provide the ability to change the encoding of an existing stream as a general purpose feature fenced about with as many "you probably don't want to use this unless you really know what you are doing, otherwise it may eat your data" warnings as seems appropriate. ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <rep...@bugs.python.org> <http://bugs.python.org/issue15216> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
