It does. It sounds like the Unicode handling in Python 2, where your program would still appear to work if it confused bytes with codepoints (through implicit d

It does. It sounds like the Unicode handling in Python 2, where your program would still appear to work if it confused bytes with codepoints (through implicit decoding/encoding), until you get a non-ASCII input somewhere and everything blows up with a UnicodeDecodeError somewhere far from where the problem is.