The most outrageous moments of my career

[volcano63]

Rather than adding that comment, why not do the typical

# -*- coding: <encoding name> -*-

?

I got the impression that this is recommended form for files without interpreter line - see PEP-263. And, I've already implied

• This line looks too artificial to be user comments (well, my level of English is much higher than that of my colleagues)
  
• This was the only change made to the file in the commit   - and this line was there for a long time
  

Also, annotations are more than just cosmetic. They allow static analysis tools to notify you of mistakes in a way similar to a statically typed language. In theory....

I can tell you a joke about the difference between in theory and in practice - but I will be banned for foul language . In practice, we don't use any analysis tools - and creating circular import is bad. Both in theory and in practice.

Making changes to files after running tests is bad practice altogether - in my humble. Breaking builds ....