Greg Ewing writes:
Web developers might grumble about the need for an extra call, but they can no longer claim it would kill the performance of their web server.
Of course they can. There never was any performance measurement that supported that claim in the first place. I don't see how PEP 393 makes a difference to them. The real problem for them is that conceptually they think ASCII in byte form *is* text, and they want to do text processing on it. They'll use any flimsy excuse to avoid a transform to str, because it's just unbearably ugly given their givens. I have sympathy for their position, I just (even today) think it's the wrong thing for Python. However, I've long since been overruled, and I have no evidence to justify saying "I told you so".<wink/>