> Ok, I understand. But is the conversion a bad thing then?

It's not a bad thing, it's just that we don't do it in C Task and we do it in pure Python Task.  Eric wants us to synchronize them so that in a very unlikely scenario where someone uses subclasses of str for names they will have exact same behaviour under both Tasks implementations.

I'd say let's just fix the C version to use PyUnicode_CheckExact.  Even though it's highly unlikely somebody ever hits this, there's no reason to keep Python and C implementations even slightly out of sync w.r.t. behaviour.