[tlug] Guido van Rossum cracks me up!

["Stephen J. Turnbull" <stephen@example.com>]

>From his blog: http://www.artima.com/weblogs/viewpost.jsp?thread=208549

Integer Reform

    * Octal literal syntax changes to 0o777, to avoid confusing
      younger developers.

and whee! I won one:

We are adopting a slightly different approach to codecs: while in
Python 2, codecs can accept either Unicode or 8-bits as input and
produce either as output, in Py3k, encoding is always a translation
from a Unicode (text) string to an array of bytes, and decoding always
goes the opposite direction. This means that we had to drop a few
codecs that don't fit in this model, for example rot13, base64 and bz2
(those conversions are still supported, just not through the
encode/decode API).

(A lot of people who mattered more agreed with me, or I with them if
you prefer.  But the people I thought Guido was listening to were
vehement that the codec concept should apply to bytes<->bytes and
unicode<->unicode translations, too.)