Today I had a relatively simple idea that unites wide strings and narrow strings in a way that is more backward comatible at the C level. It's quite possible this has already been considered and rejected for reasons that are not yet obvious to me, but I'll give it a shot anyway. The main concept is not to provide a new string type but to extend the existing string object like so: - wide strings are stored as if they were narrow strings, simply using two bytes for each Unicode character. - there's a flag that specifies whether the string is narrow or wide. - the ob_size field is the _physical_ length of the data; if the string is wide, len(s) will return ob_size/2, all other string operations will have to do similar things. - there can possibly be an encoding attribute which may specify the used encoding, if known. Admittedly, this is tricky and involves quite a bit of effort to implement, since all string methods need to have narrow/wide switch. To make it worse, it hardly offers anything the current solution doesn't. However, it offers one IMHO _big_ advantage: C code that just passes strings along does not need to change: wide strings can be seen as narrow strings without any loss. This allows for __str__() & str() and friends to work with unicode strings without any change. Any thoughts? Just