BTW, I call PEP 261, "Support for "wide" Unicode characters", not finally accepted and not implemented. Is that correct? Is it going to be finished before 2.2final, or should I simply describe it as partially implemented in the final version of the text?

To my knowledge, it is completely implemented. You may mention that --disable-unicode is now also supported. There is atleast one error in the PEP, namely that the define for wide Unicode Py_UNICODE_WIDE (Py_UNICODE_SIZE also exists, but isn't used except to define Py_UNICODE_WIDE). I'm also not sure certain the all codecs handle all surrogate cases correctly in all circumstances, but that is in the realm of bug reports. One further Unicode change: The bullet item "When presented with a Unicode filename on Windows ..." should be extended with "On Unix, the locale's character set is used if nl_langinfo(CODESET) is available." Two new builtins are missing in your text, OverflowWarning and super. HTH, Martin