[pre-PEP] You have a lot of good points in there (also some inaccuracies) and I agree that Python should move to using Unicode for text data and arrays for binary data. Some things you may be missing though is that Python already has support for a few features you mention, e.g. codecs.open() provide more or less what you have in mind with fopen() and the compiler can already unify Unicode and string literals using the -U command line option. What you don't talk about in the PEP is that Python's stdlib isn't even Unicode aware yet, and whatever unification steps we take, this project will have to preceed it. The problem with making the stdlib Unicode aware is that of deciding which parts deal with text data or binary data -- the code sometimes makes assumptions about the nature of the data and at other times it simply doesn't care. In this light I think you ought to focus Python 3k with your PEP. This will also enable better merging techniques due to the lifting of the type/class difference. -- Marc-Andre Lemburg ______________________________________________________________________ Company: http://www.egenix.com/ Consulting: http://www.lemburg.com/ Python Pages: http://www.lemburg.com/python/