python 2.7 and unicode (one more time)

[Chris Angelico]

On Mon, Nov 24, 2014 at 9:51 AM, Gregory Ewing
<greg.ewing at canterbury.ac.nz> wrote:
> Marko Rauhamaa wrote:
>>
>> Unicode strings is not wrong but the technical emphasis on Unicode is as
>> strange as a "tire car" or "rectangular door" when "car" and "door" are
>> what you usually mean.
>
>
> The reason Unicode gets emphasised so much is that
> until relatively recently, it *wasn't* what "string"
> usually meant in Python.
>
> When Python 3 has been around for as long as Python
> 2 was, things may change.

I doubt it; the bytes() type is sufficiently stringy to require the
distinction to still be made. PEP 461 makes it clear that byte strings
are not blobs of opaque data, but are very definitely ASCII-compatible
objects, for the benefit of boundary code.

ChrisA