[gthank]

Python 2 will store Unicode as either UCS-16 or UCS-32, depending on how it was compiled. The horrible monstrosity that is the default "string" (those are scare quotes; I know how the formatting on here works) in Python 2 is not Unicode, so it obviously doesn't use UCS-16 or UCS-32.

[cygx]

UCS-4 is UTF-32 (or, to be pedantic, a superset), whereas UCS-2 is the fixed-width predecessor of UTF-16.

There's no such thing as UCS-16 or UCS-32.