Report from the Python Language Summit

>Yet I find the whole char/byte distinction to be extremely moronic.

It is, but I'd say because nobody has a clue how to define "char". It can mean all sorts of things depending on where it's used:

* 1 byte in a legacy encoding (or C)
* If you're using a half-baked library, it's 2 or 4 bytes UTF-16. (Qt4 falls into the "completely baked" category as it'll let you backspace over half an emoji character.)
* If you're lucky, someone actually implemented Unicode correctly and a "character" is a variable length sequence of bytes encoding a full ISO-10646 codepoint. Such as U+00C7, which is the character "Ç". Or U+0327, which is a squiggly line and definitely not a character.
* The only sensible and correct definition: a character is the thing you would write by hand — "Ḉ".length == "Ḉ".length == "Ḉ".length — almost no software uses this definition.