[gardentheory]

Well the lighter solution and more Pythonic solution is strong typing. If a Unicode string and a byte string could not be combined then the problem would not exist AFAIK. For example "a" + 1 is an error, why is u"a" + "s" not an error?

[masklinn]

> For example "a" + 1 is an error, why is u"a" + "s" not an error?

"a" + b"s" is an error in Python 3.

[gardentheory]

Sorry, that was my point. Strengthening the types in python3 solves the problem without static typing being needed at all.

[masklinn]

ok.

Static types solve it earlier though, especially for little-exercised code paths which could be forgotten or missed in testing.

[xerula]

But b"s" + "a" is an error in Py3.

[qznc]

This just gives a different error message. It does not help to find the error source.

The programmer would probably just try to fix it via str(u"a")+"s" or u"a" + unicode("s").