On 2018-07-16 18:31, Steven D'Aprano wrote: > You say that all you want is a switch to turn off Unicode (and > replace it with what? Kanji strings? Cyrillic? Shift_JS? no of > course not, I'm being absurd -- replace it with ASCII, what else > could any right-thinking person want, right?).
But we already have this. If I want to turn off Unicode strings, I type "python2", and if I want to enable Unicode strings, I type "python3". While the python world has moved its efforts into improving Python3, Python2 hasn't suddenly stopped working. It just stopped receiving improvements. If the "old-man shakes-fist at progress" crowd doesn't like unicode stings in Py3, just keep on using Py2. You (generic) won't get arrested. There are no church^WPython police. -tkc -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list