I am fine with ditching the feature and forcing people to deal with the encoding issues externally to 'exec', although as you pointed out dealing with any -*- encoding marker might be a pain without some library help (although doesn't the parser pick up on this and handle those nasty details?).

As for execfile, PEP 3100 has it listed for removal in favour of moving people over to using 'exec'.

The main thing is trying to come up with an easy solution for replacing 'reload' with a reasonable one-liner when debugging at the interpreter.

And yes, I hope encoding declarations can go away and the world either lives with just UTF-8 or BOM+UTF-16 (I really wish we could just require this for all Python source files and start towards this, but I know some people would flip out over that).