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Comment by noselasd | Hacker News Reader

If it was changed from ascii to utf-8, how does it break everyting else ?

ASCII doesn't exist as such.

Characters are encoded in one byte and ascii leaves the highest 128 characters undefined. They are interpreted system-wise, depends on the locale and user settings.

"ascii" the codec does exist under python. It's strictly defined as byte values 0-127, anything in the 128-255 range causes a decoding error...

    >>> b"abc\xf0".decode("ascii")
    UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xf0 in position 3

Thus, moving the default from "ascii" to an ASCII-superset should have no decoding issues for previously valid files, since those bytes were never valid to start with.

ASCII very much exists - but what you describe is an entierly different thing. Sure - if the change is from default-user-locale to UTF-8, things would break.

But if the changelog is truthful, and the change is from ASCII to UTF-8, things should not break - at least not to any great extent.

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