[Python-Dev] readd u'' literal support in 3.3?

[Chris McDonough]

On Sat, 2011-12-10 at 15:55 +1000, Nick Coghlan wrote:

> So I'm back to being -1 on the idea of adding back u'' literals for
> 3.3. Instead, people should explicitly call str() on any literals that
> they want to be actual str instances both in 3.x and in 2.x when the
> unicode literals future import is in effect.

After thinking on it a while, I can't see anything wrong with this
strategy except for the 10X performance hit for defining native
literals.

Truth be told, in the vast majority of WSGI apps only high-level WSGI
libraries (like WebOb and Werkzeug) and standalone middleware really
needs to work with native strings.  And the middleware really should be
using the high-level libraries to parse WSGI anyway.  So there are a
finite number of places where it's actually a real issue.

As someone who ported WebOb and other stuff built on top of it to Python
3 without using "from __future__ import unicode_literals", I'm kinda sad
that to be using best practice I'll have to go back and flip the
polarity on everything.  It's my cross to bear, though.  If I have any
issue with it in the future I'll bring u'' back up.

- C