Ian Bicking writes:

> I'm proposing these specials would be used in polymorphic functions, like
> the functions in urllib.parse. I would not personally use them in my own
> code (unless of course I was writing my own polymorphic functions).
>
> This also makes it less important that the objects be a full stand-in for
> text, as their use should be isolated to specific functions, they aren't
> objects that should be passed around much. So you can easily identify and
> quickly detect if you use unsupported operations on those text-like
> objects.

OK. That sounds reasonable to me, but I don't see any need for
a builtin type for it. Inclusion in the stdlib is not quite a
no-brainer, but given Guido's endorsement of polymorphism, I can't
bring myself to go lower than +0.9 <wink>.

Agreed on a builtin; I think it would be fine to put something in the strings module, and then in these examples code that used '/' would instead use strings.ascii('/') (not sure so sure of what the name should be though).