Sorry for the delayed response -- I do want to respond to several points. First, you're sort of correct that you need the 2to3 tool for a program to target Pyt

Sorry for the delayed response -- I do want to respond to several points. First, you're sort of correct that you need the 2to3 tool for a program to target Python 2 and Python 3. There are certain programming techniques (such as "from __future__ import *) that will allow you to write you code in such a way that it will run on both Python 2 and 3, although I've not used these on any project of size. But if you wrote your code using plain vanilla 2.x, then you'd need to use the 2to3 tool, although again I've not used it myself and have heard mixed reviews. Unicode is probably the biggest change from Python 2 to 3 that introduces incompatibilities, although I think there are tricks for dealing with that as well. I like Ruby's approach to Unicode based on what you described. Why do you think this is a mistake? I expect you are correct that Ruby is much further along in moving from 1.8 to 1.9, because it sounds like Ruby has handled the upgrade path well (to be honest, I'm not sure Python has).