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

[Laurence Rowe]

On Mon, 12 Dec 2011 22:18:40 +0100, Chris McDonough <chrism at plope.com>  
wrote:

> On Mon, 2011-12-12 at 09:50 -0500, PJ Eby wrote:
>
>
>>         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.
>>
>>
>> Eh?  If you don't need unicode_literals, what's the problem?
>
> Porting the WebOb code sucked.  It's only about 5K lines of code but the
> porting effort took me about 80 hours.  Some of the problem is certainly
> my own idiocy, but some of it is just because straddling code across
> Python 2 and Python 3 currently requires that you change lots and lots
> of code for suspect benefit.

Could this manual work be cut down if there was a version of 2to3 that  
targeted the subset of the language that is compatible with both 2 and 3?  
That would seem to avoid most of the drawbacks to the current 2to3  
approach.

Laurence