> However, what I want to see is how people deal with such issues when > sharing their code: what are their experiences and what measures do > they mandate to make it all work properly? You can see some > discussions about various IDEs mandating UTF-8 as the default > encoding, along with UTF-8 being the required encoding for various > kinds of special Java configuration files.
I believe the problem is solved when everybody uses Eclipse. You can set a default encoding for all Java source files in a project, and you check the project file into your source repository. Eclipse both provides the editor and drives the compiler, and does so in a consistent way. > Yes, it should reduce confusion at a technical level. But what about > the tools, the editors, and so on? If every computing environment had > decent UTF-8 support, wouldn't it be easier to say that everything has > to be in UTF-8? For both Python and Java, it's too much historical baggage already. When source encodings were introduced to Python, allowing UTF-8 only was already proposed. People rejected it at the time, because a) they had source files where weren't encoded in UTF-8, and were afraid of breaking them, and b) their editors would not support UTF-8. So even with Python 3, UTF-8 is *just* the default default encoding. I would hope that all Python IDEs, over time, learn about this default, until then, users may have to manually configure their IDEs and editors. With a default of UTF-8, it's still simpler than with PEP 263: you can say that .py files are UTF-8, and your editor will guess incorrectly only if there is an encoding declaration other than UTF-8. Regards, Martin -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
