Version upgrade blocked mentally

[Albert Hopkins]

On Sat, 2008-11-29 at 12:32 -0800, Adam E wrote:
> I have read in my copy of Programming Python that all strings will be
> Unicode and there will be a byte type.
> 
> This is mentally keeping me from upgrading to 2.6 .

Care to explain? 

Actually what you describe is a change change takes place in Python 3.0.
Basically Python is doing away with doing away with 2 different string
types (str and unicode) and combining them into one.  And streams which
are truly byte streams will have their own type called (bytes).
Mentally that makes more sense to me as it becomes a headache having to
work/convert back and forth between string types and unicode types.

Python 2.6 introduces "bytes" but they are basically strings that allow
forward-compatibility with Python 3. One of Python 2.6's main purposes
is to make it easier to transition code from 2.x to 3.0.

> 
> I'm curious, but are there still some who prefer Python 2.5?
> I don't mind constructive criticsm.
> --

I'm sure there are, or at least were, but they've had plenty of time to
voice their concerns up to now.