June 1, 2008
9:16 p.m.
Guido van Rossum wrote:
There are quite a few core APIs that accept no substitutes, and being an instance of basestring was intended to guarantee that a value is accepted by such APIs.
In that case, the idea of a user-defined string class that doesn't inherit from str or unicode seems to be a lost cause, since it will never be acceptable in those places, whatever is done with ABCs. -- Greg