Marc-Andre Lemburg <mal@lemburg.com>:

Change the default encoding to 'ascii' (it was previously
defined as UTF-8).

Note: The implementation still uses UTF-8 to implement
the buffer protocol, so C APIs will still see UTF-8. This
is on purpose: rather than fixing the Unicode implementation,
the C APIs should be made Unicode aware.

Objects/unicodeobject.c

@@ -4710,7 +4710,7 @@ void _PyUnicode_Init()
 
     /* Init the implementation */
     unicode_empty = _PyUnicode_New(0);
-    strcpy(unicode_default_encoding, "utf-8");
+    strcpy(unicode_default_encoding, "ascii");
 }
 
 /* Finalize the Unicode implementation */