default encoding ("ascii") is changed. This safes quite a few cycles
during startup since the first call to .setdefaultencoding() will
initialize the codec registry and the encodings package.
See python-dev for a discussion (Subject: "[Python-Dev] [comp.lang.python] sys.setdefaultencoding (2.0b1)").
Added support to set the default encoding of strings
at startup time to the values defined by the C locale.
The sys.setdefaultencoding() API is deleted after having
set up the encoding, so that user code cannot subsequentely
change the setting. This effectively means that only site.py
may alter the default setting.
how to exit (in a platform dependent way!). We use os.sep to
determine which platform we're on, since I expect that this will work
better for minority platforms.
Marc-André Lemburg
Guido van Rossum
Fredrik Lundh
Jeremy Hylton