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I still wonder why anybody would want to do that, so I don't
see it as a big problem that it gives an error in 2.4: it
*should* give an error, although not the one it currently gives.

It seems that wigy would expect that the encoding
declaration is ignored, whereas you (nnorwitz) are
suggesting that the UTF-8 default should be ignored. In the
face of ambiguity, refuse the temptation to guess.

So I still think it should give a SyntaxError instead. I'll
attach an alternative patch.