Paul Sokolovsky writes:
Please put that in perspective when alarming over O(1) indexing of inherently problematic niche datatype. (Again, it's not my or MicroPython's fault that it was forced as standard string type. Maybe if CPython seriously considered now-standard UTF-8 encoding, results of what is "str" type might be different. But CPython has gigabytes of heap to spare, and for MicroPython, every half-bit is precious).
Would you please stop trolling? The reasons for adopting Unicode as a separate data type were good and sufficient in 2000, and they remain so today, even if you have been fortunate enough not to burn yourself on character-byte conflation yet. What matters to you is that str (unicode) is an opaque type -- there is no specification of the internal representation in the language reference, and in fact several different ones coexist happily across existing Python implementations -- and you're free to use a UTF-8 implementation if that suits the applications you expect for MicroPython. PEP 393 exists, of course, and specifies the current internal representation for CPython 3. But I don't see anything in it that suggests it's mandated for any other implementation.