Why does the "".join(r) do this?

[Terry Reedy]

"Jim Hefferon" <jhefferon at smcvt.edu> wrote in message
news:545cb8c2.0405220521.ac117a4 at posting.google.com...
> Thanks, Peter and others, you have been enlightening.  I understand
> you to say that Python insists that I explicitly decide the decoding,
> and not just smoosh the strings.  Thanks.

Abstractly, byte strings and unicode strings are different types of beasts.
If you forget what you know about the CPython computer implementation and
linear computer memories, it make little sense to combine them.  The result
would have to be some currently nonexistent byte-unicode string.

Terry J. Reedy