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Well... what more than useful is it supposed to be?
Earh-shaking? Spiritually rewarding? ;-) As long as there is
a default encoding I'd like to be able to set it in a
simpler way than I can now. And I'd like to be able to set
it once, at interpreter startup. An environment variable
seems like a reasonable way to do that.

If the notion of default encoding is removed from Python's
library the suggested modification is going to go away as well. 

If you want to reject the feature request because the notion
of default encoding is depricated, than so be it. From my
point of view the suggested modification is something I'd
like to see.