[ninkendo]

Interesting that Python 2 couldn't fix that in a hotfix/point release... UTF-8 is backwards compatible with ASCII so it shouldn't break anything if source started being interpreted as UTF8. I'd be curious to see what their reasoning is.

[dguaraglia]

I would imagine Python's approach to introducing new language features had a lot to do with it. Having to go through the PEP system takes some time, and changes like these tend to be reserved for minor-version releases. All in all, I love the PEP system, it's such an open concept and I've been surprised by the amount of quality proposals that get implemented. Wish Go had something like it.

[ubernostrum]

The change to UTF-8 source encoding also changed the legal set of characters for identifiers, and specified how to normalize them. Which in turn is the reason behind this thing I posted on Twitter a while back:

https://gist.github.com/ubernostrum/b7b705bf21b86a1b5c1e2c9f...

And also is a big enough change to not really be something that could happen in Python 2.