[Python-Dev] Divorcing str and unicode (no more implicit conversions).

[Bob Ippolito]

On Oct 23, 2005, at 3:10 PM, Jason Orendorff wrote:

> -1 on decoding implicitly "as needed".  This causes decoding to happen
> late, in unpredictable places.  Decodes can fail; they should happen
> as early and as close to the data source as possible.

That's not necessarily true... Some codecs can't fail, like latin1.   
I think the main use case for this is to speed up usage of text in  
these sorts of formats anyway.

-bob