wrt "undecidable byte escape" I think that wouldn't solve the problems with filenames. Files would have to enter Python land escaped which would mean my file re

wrt "undecidable byte escape" I think that wouldn't solve the problems with filenames. Files would have to enter Python land escaped which would mean my file really named \x00 would become \\x00 You can't escape only the broken filenames, because a valid unicode filename could contain an escape sequence, which would incorrectly be unescaped when returning to the OS I think you really do need a non-str type that can be silently converted to str 99% of the time