[BiteCode_dev]

I understand to not want utf8 for the identifiers, as you type them often and want the lowest common keyboard layout demonitor, but comments and hardcoded strings, certainly not.

Otherwise, chinese coders can't put their name in comments? Or do they need to invent an ascii names for themself, like we forced them to do in the past for immigration ?

And no hard coded value for any string in scripts then? I mean, names, cities, user messages and label, all in in config files even for the smallest quick and dirty script because you can't type "Joyeux Noël" in a string in your file? Can't hardcode my "Téléchargements" folder when in doing some batch work in my shell?

Do I have write all my monetary symbols with escape sequences? Having a table of constant filled with EURO_SIGN=b'\xe2\x82\xac' instead of using "€"? Same for emoji?

I disagree, and I'm certainly glad that not only Python3 allows this, but do it in a way that is actually stable and safe to do. I rarely have encoding issues nowadays, and when I do, it's always because something outside is doing something fishy.

Utf8 in my code file, yes please.

[BiteCode_dev]

Lol, just realized my table should be "EURO_SIGN=b'\xe2\x82\xac'.decode('utf8')".

Damn, a perfect example of why it's nice to be able to just do "€" in my file. It's also less bugs.

[deathanatos]

If we're still talking about Python 3, you can also write,

  EURO_SIGN = '\N{EURO SIGN}'

Which is ASCII, and very clear about which character the escape is. I wish more languages had \N. That said, I'm also fine with a coder choosing to write a literal "€" — that's just as clear, to me.

While I don't believe the \N is backwards compatible to Python 2, explicitly declaring the file encoding is, and you can have a UTF-8 encoded source file w/ Python 2 in that way.

I'd also note the box drawing characters are extremely useful for diagrams in comments.

(And… it's 2021. If someone's tooling can't handle UTF-8, it's time for them to get with the program, not for us to waste time catering to them. There's enough real work to be done as it is…)

[speedplane]

You can do Unicode in Python 2. You can do Unicode faster and easier in Python 3. But by gaining that ability, they set the existing community back by 10 years.