Python 2 string handling was really quite a mess compared to Python 3, and fixing it would have required manual intervention in any case (since it wasn't possib

Python 2 string handling was really quite a mess compared to Python 3, and fixing it would have required manual intervention in any case (since it wasn't possible to distinguish usage of strings in Python 2 from raw byte sequences in a lot of cases). I think the print statement to function part of it was a way way more minor pain point compared to the str/unicode change, and is a fully automatable transformation anyway.