> That's what happened to fork the language, but really glosses on the "why." Paraphrased: "People were too lazy about using the unicode type and bytes type, so

> That's what happened to fork the language, but really glosses on the "why." Paraphrased: "People were too lazy about using the unicode type and bytes type, so we forced all string constants to be unicode." I strongly disagree. I actually tried using unicode correctly in python 2, it is actually quite hard. It's similar to using memory safely in C, it is possible, but there are many gotchas. In python 3 all of this is done with no effort.