Just to be clear, I wasn't talking about the change making Unicode strings universal in 3.0. I was talking about the change to the internal string representatio

Just to be clear, I wasn't talking about the change making Unicode strings universal in 3.0. I was talking about the change to the internal string representation in 3.3, described by PEP 393. The change to dictionaries seems a lot more likely to make a difference, although it was introduced much later.