just found out about this change in the latest official stable release and it's breaking my code all over the place. something like "{:s}".format( self.pc ) used to work in 3.3.4 and prior releases now raise exception rather then return a string 'None' when self.pc was never update to not None (was initialized to None during object init). this means I have to manually go and change every single line that expects smooth formatting to a check to see if the variable is still a 'NoneType'.

should we just create a format for None, alias string format to repr/str on classes without format implementation or put more thought into this