> There was this assumption that Unicode code points were the correct single unit to talk about Unicode. The most messed-up thing about Python 3 is that it's s

> There was this assumption that Unicode code points were the correct single unit to talk about Unicode. The most messed-up thing about Python 3 is that it's supposed to be justified by doing Unicode right and they still got it wrong. Having strings be sequences of Unicode code points is a super-bizarre design. That is, Python 3 strings indeed are semantically sequences of Unicode code points rather than sequences of Unicode scalar values. You can not only materialize lone surrogates (defensible for compatibility with UTF-16) but you can also materialize surrogate pairs in addition to actual astral characters. You still can't materialize units that are above the Unicode range, though, so it's not like C++'s std::u32string. Looking at the old PEPs, it appears to have arisen by accident rather than as an actual design.