On 8/14/19 7:19 AM, Niall Douglas wrote:
> Lots of great points earlier. I mostly agree with them.
>
>> I would support such a thing. All other languages went there and it
>> works great for them. Python will for example assume utf8 in the absence
>> of pragma.
> This will be probably an underappreciated point: Python started off
> pre-Unicode, same as C++, and later on switched the default from "your
> current C locale" (i.e. only 7-bit ASCII was portable) into utf-8.
>
> Their world did not end. Some users complained, sure, but because it was
> announced in advance, and one could pragma opt-out, it was fine.

I suggest you read https://snarky.ca/why-python-3-exists. Some choice
quotes:

>
> We will never do this kind of backwards-incompatible change again
>
> We have decided as a team that a change as big as
> |unicode|/|str|/|bytes| will never happen so abruptly again. When we
> started Python 3 we thought/hoped that the community would do what
> Python did and do one last feature release supporting Python 2 and
> then cut over to Python 3 development for feature development while
> doing bugfix releases only for the Python 2 version. That obviously
> didn't happen and we have learned our lesson.
I think the lesson we should take from Python3 is that caution is
warranted and that we need to be (as always) very careful about changing
the semantics of existing code.

>
> C++ could do with being bolder in becoming simpler and less surprising
> for end users. It is not unreasonable for a German to type an umlaut
> into a string literal, and expect that C++ source code to be portable
> and unsurprising by default.

Personally, I appreciate that the C++ committee is sensitive to backward
compatibility. I agree we need to make things easier for programmers,
and there are steps we can take that don't require a
utf-8-all-the-things approach.

Tom.

>
> Niall
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