H98 Text IO

[Jules Bean]

Matthew Bentham wrote:
> "It’s not unreasonable to have a program that wants to encode its outputin a particular encoding. The example I gave earlier still seemsreasonable to be, a program that takes input in one encoding andrecodes to a different encoding on its output, with both the input andoutput encoding specified on the command line. Clearly such a programshould be able to use stdin and stdout so that it can form part of apipe. So how in Python do I change sys.stdout to use a particular encoding?  It’s a right pain."
> 


Which is an excellent point.

But there are two (different) areas here.

(1) how we make the over-simplistic H98 interface do something 'mostly 
right' or 'least worst'

(2) how we design a better (but necessarily non-H98) interface for more 
sophisticated programs.

And we need to solve (1) independently of all the possible nice design 
spaces for (2).

Jules