In Python 3, the default source file encoding is UTF-8. As far as the Python interpreter is concerned we could remove # -*- coding: utf-8 -*-.

Yet the encoding declaration might be useful to some IDEs, especially on Windows which still seems to be enforcing Windows-1252 as the default encoding on "Western" locales. On the other hand, VS tends to write into UTF-8-BOM (with an initial BOM) so we're doomed anyway!