[Python-Dev] from __future__ import unicode_strings?

[Neil Schemenauer]

I'm in the process of summarizing the dicussion on the bytes object
and an idea just occured to me.  Imagine that I want to write code
that deals with strings and I want to be maximally compatible with
P3k.  It would be nice if I could add:

    from __future__ import unicode_strings

and have string literals without a 'u' prefix become unicode
instances.  I'm not sure how tricky the implementation would be but
it seems like a useful feature.

An even crazier idea is to have that import change 'str' to be
an alias for 'unicode'.

  Neil