On 2/26/2012 7:46 AM, Armin Ronacher wrote: I am not enthusiastic about adding duplication that is useless for writing Python 3 code, but like others, I do want to encourage more porting of libraries to run with Python 3. I understand that the unicode transition seems the be the biggest barrier, especially for some applications. It is OK with me if ported code only runs on 3.3+, with its improved unicode. If u'' is added, I would like it to be added as deprecated in the doc with a note that it is only intended for multi-version Python 2/3 code.
In case this PEP gets approved I will refactor the tokenize module while adding support for "u" prefixes and use that as the basis for a installation hook for older Python 3 versions.
I presume such a hook would simply remove 'u' prefixes and would run *much* faster than 2to3. If such a hook is satisfactory for 3.2, why would it not be satisfactory for 3.3? -- Terry Jan Reedy