2010/6/20 Steven D'Aprano <steve@pearwood.info>:
Python 2.x introduced Unicode strings. Python 3.x merely makes them the default.
"Merely"? To me this looks as the main reason why a lot of projects haven't been ported to Python 3 yet. I attempted to port pyftpdlib to python 3 several times and the biggest show stopper has always been the bytes / string difference introduced by Python 3 which forces you to *know* and *use* Unicode every time you deal with some text and 2to3 is completely useless here. I can only imagine how difficult can it be to do such a conversion in a project like Twisted or Django where the I/O plays a fundamental role. The choice of forcing the user to use Unicode and "think in Unicode" was a very brave one, and I'm sure it's for the better, but not everyone wants to deal with that because Unicode is hard to swallow. The majority of people prefer to stay with bytes and eventually learn and introduce Unicode only when that is actually needed. --- Giampaolo http://code.google.com/p/pyftpdlib http://code.google.com/p/psutil