The largest new feature in Python 2.0 is a new fundamental data type: Unicode strings. Unicode uses 16-bit numbers to represent characters instead of the 8-bit

The largest new feature in Python 2.0 is a new fundamental data type: Unicode strings. Unicode uses 16-bit numbers to represent characters instead of the 8-bit number used by ASCII, meaning that 65,536 distinct characters can be supported. It's interesting that both Python 2.0 and Python 3.0 made fundamental changes to how the language deals with text.