In the Tutorial, the BFDL says: Strings can be subscripted (indexed); like in C, the first character of a string has subscript (index) 0. There is no separate character type; a character is simply a string of size one. Like in Icon, substrings can be specified with the slice notation: two indices separated by a colon.
http://www.python.org/doc/current/tut/node5.html#SECTION005120000000000000000 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
