[jimktrains2]

> unnecessary incompatibilities like the u" notation for Unicode string literals that was dropped

I mean a hard difference between a string and bytes and strings being utf-8 by default seem to be a necessary (and good) reason?

[glesica]

But unicode strings are the default in Python 3, so they could have kept the 'u' syntax and just let it be a no-op. I think that's what was meant.

[PythonicAlpha]

Right. And they even changed it, I think in Py3.3 -- but that was very late, when many people already decided not to port.