Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> 
> Martin v. Löwis <martin@v.loewis.de> added the comment:
> 
>> If you remove both, Python will get very poor grades for OS
>> interoperability on platforms that often deal with multiple
>> different encodings for file names.
> 
> Why that? It will work very well in such a setting, much better
> than, say, Java.

Well, Java pretty much fails completely in this respect, so being
better than Java is not exactly the benchmark I had in mind :-)

I think the proper benchmark would be a Python2 application that
has no problems with these things, since file names are just
bytes that refer to files on the disk, with no associated encoding -
at least on Unix and related platforms.

Being pedantic about forcing some encoding onto things that don't
have an encoding won't really work out in practice. Dealing with
file names, OS environments, pipes and sockets is dirty work, so
I think we should go with the 80-20 approach in making 80% easy
and 20% harder, but still possible.