[Python-Dev] Generalised String Coercion

[Guido van Rossum]

Ouch. Too much discussion to respond to it all. Please remember that
in Jythin and IronPython, str and unicode are already synonyms. That's
how Python 3.0 will do it, except unicode will disappear as being
redundant. I like the bytes/frozenbytes pair idea. Streams could grow
a getpos()/setpos() API pair that can be used for stateful encodings
(although it sounds like seek()/tell() would be okay to use in most
cases as long as you read in units of whole lines). For sockets,
send()/recv() would deal in bytes, and makefile() would get an
encoding parameter. I'm not going to change my mind on text() unless
someone explains what's so attractive about it.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)