On the heels of Armin's blog post about the troubles of making the same codebase run on both Python 2 and Python 3, I have a concrete suggestion. It would help a lot for code that straddles both Py2 and Py3 to be able to make use of u'' literals. It would seem to be an easy thing to reenable (see http://www.reddit.com/r/Python/comments/n3q7q/thoughts_on_python_3_armin_ron... ) . It would seem to cost very little in terms of maintenance, and not much in docs. It would make it possible to share code like this across py2 and py3: a = u'foo' Instead of (with e.g. six): a = u('foo') Or: from __future__ import unicode_literals a = 'foo' I recognize that the last option is probably the way "its meant to be done", but in reality it's just more practical to not fail when literal notation is more specific than strictly necessary. - C