Joshua Judson Rosen <roz...@geekspace.com> writes: > If you have to make an assumption, I'd really think that it'd be > better to use whatever the host OS's default is, if the host OS has > such a thing--using an assumption of ISO 8859-1 works only in select > regions on unix systems, and may fail even in those select regions > on Windows, Mac OS, and other systems; without the OS > considerations, just the regional constraints are likely to make an > ISO-8859-1 assumption result in /incorrect/ results anywhere > eastward of central Europe. Is a user in Russia (or China, or Japan) > *really* most likely to be using ISO 8859-1?
The fallacy in the above is to assume that a given programmer will only be opening files created in their current locale. I say that is a fallacy, because programmers in fact open program files created all over the world in different locales; and those files should, where possible, be interpreted by Python the same everwhere. Assuming a *single*, defined, encoding in the absence of an explicit declaration at least makes all Python installations (of a given version) read any program file the same in any locale. -- \ “If [a technology company] has confidence in their future | `\ ability to innovate, the importance they place on protecting | _o__) their past innovations really should decline.” —Gary Barnett | Ben Finney -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
