[Python-Dev] What should the focus for 2.6 be?

[Georg Brandl]

Talin wrote:
> Guido van Rossum wrote:
>> I've been thinking a bit about a focus for the 2.6 release.
>> 
>> We are now officially starting parallel development of 2.6 and 3.0. I
>> really don't expect that we'll be able to merge the easily into the
>> 3.0 branch much longer, so effectively 3.0 will be a fork of 2.5.
>> 
>> I wonder if it would make sense to focus in 2.6 on making porting of
>> 2.6 code to 3.0 easier, rather than trying to introduce new features
>> in 2.6. We've done releases without new language features before;
>> notable 2.3 didn't add anything new (except making a few __future__
>> imports redundant) and concentrated on bugfixes, performance, and
>> library additions.
> 
> I've been thinking about the transition to unicode strings, and I want 
> to put forward a notion that might allow the transition to be done 
> gradually instead of all at once.
> 
> The idea would be to temporarily introduce a new name for 8-bit strings 
> - let's call it "ascii". An "ascii" object would be exactly the same as 
> today's 8-bit strings.
> 
> The 'str' builtin symbol would be assigned to 'ascii' by default, but 
> you could assign it to 'unicode' if you wanted to default to wide strings:
> 
>     str = ascii   # Selects 8-bit strings by default
>     str = unicode # Selects unicode strings by default

This doesn't change the type of string literals.

Georg