[Python-Dev] Bytes path support

[Guido van Rossum]

I'm sorry my moment of levity was taken so seriously.

With my serious hat on, I would like to claim that *conceptually* filenames
are most definitely text. Due to various historical accidents the UNIX
system calls often encoded text as arguments, and we sometimes need to
control that encoding. Hence the occasional need for bytes arguments. But
most of the time you don't have to think about that, and forcing users to
worry about it is mostly as counter-productive as forcing to think about
the encoding of every text file.

-- 
--Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido)
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