On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 12:06 PM, Steve Dower <steve.do...@python.org> wrote: > The native encoding on Windows has been UTF-16 since Windows NT. Obviously > we've survived without Python tokenization support for a long time, but > every API uses it. > > I've hit a few cases where it would have been handy for Python to be able to > detect it, though nothing I couldn't work around. Saying it is rarely used > is rather exposing your own unawareness though - it could arguably be the > most commonly used encoding (depending on how you define "used").
What matters here is: How likely is it that an arbitrary Python script (or, say, "arbitrary text file") is encoded UTF-16 rather than something ASCII-compatible? I think even Notepad defaults to UTF-8 for files, now. The fact that it's sending text to the GUI subsystem in UTF-16 is immaterial here. Can the py.exe launcher handle a UTF-16 shebang? (I'm pretty sure Unix program loaders won't.) That alone might be a reason for strongly encouraging ASCII-compat encodings. ChrisA _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: https://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
