Guido van Rossum wrote:
> I'll look at the patches later, but we've gone over this before on the
> list. str() of *any* object needs to return *something*. Yes, it's
> unfortunate that this masks bugs in the transitional period, but it
> really is the best thing in the long run. We had other exceptional
> treatement for str vs. bytes (e.g. the comparison was raising TypeError
> for a while) and we had to kill that too.

Can we agree to a compromise and make str(bytes()) return
bytes().decode("ascii")? I think it's a sensible default behavior and
catches the errors in the code I've seen so far.

Christian