[Python-3000] characters data type

[Michael Chermside]

Josiah Carlson writes:
> it would be nice if *anyone* were to reply with
> something, *anything*, even "...I have low hopes for something useful
> coming out of this." (my favorite Guido quote, btw) would give me some
> perspective to either acknowledge my insanity, or the other thing.

I think keeping the existing str class (which implements immutable-
sequence-of-bytes) for Py3K but renaming it seems wise. Allowing literals
using b"" seems like an easy win. Since the code is already written
and already has years of real-world testing and optimizations it seems
a shame to throw it out. The only reason I can think of for doing so is
to prevent people from using the bytes type where they ought to be
moving to the new str class (which implements unicode strings). But I
think the name change will be sufficient motivation. None of this has
any bearing on the need for a mutable-sequence-of-bytes implementation.
If stronger hints were needed it could be moved from the core to the
stdlib (but I doubt that would be needed).

However, I'm trusting in Guido (and others) to come to the right
conclusion once they begin working with the code. I'm guessing they'll
encounter a few places where they actually want to convert existing
str code to sequence-of-bytes not to unicode, and then they'll realize
it's worth keeping around our well-tested old str class.

-- Michael Chermside