I've just checked in the patches by Bill Tutt, which add support for \N{NAMED UNICODE CHARACTERS}. The new escape code is available per default in the standard unicode-escape codec. The (big) hash table needed to drive the mapping is loaded on demand to reduce memory overhead.
The patch also includes a new tool called perfecthash which is used to generate the hash table (and function) from names to ordinals. I'm sure this can be of use in other areas too... but it needs some more work to become more generic (currently you have to edit the source code to generate other mapping modules).
Thanks to Bill Tutt -- this is great work !
Thanks Bill and Marc-Andre! I've closed the patch in SF now. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)