Normal and unicode strings

Hi all,

I've started to look at Unicode..

There're two types of strings in Python, 'str' and 'unicode'.
I guess there're technical reasons to have two different
classes. Please, could somebody explain me these reasons?
(or tell me where this is documented). Please, keep in mind
that I've never looked at the Python sources and I'm still
quite ignorant about Unicode.

I think that for the user (the Python programmer) it would
be better to have only one class of strings, if possible of
course. Is there any chance that this will be addressed in
future versions of Python? Something similar to the unification
of integers and long integers. I haven't found anything in
the index of PEPs.


Many thanks for your time,
jdavid