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"I wouldn't raise much opposition against tobytes() as an alias for tostring(), although that sounds more like duplicating an otherwise simple API."
Adding an alias would be a way address the 2.X/3.X terminology overlap; string traditionally implies 8-bit in 2.X, and apparently now Unicode in 3.X. That's likely to cause a lot of confusion for people switching over (and to people writing 3.X documentation, as well; the array module's documentation is an example).
ET isn't the only thing with tostring functionality, of course -- it's pretty much the standard name for "serialize data structure to byte string for later transmission" -- so it probably wouldn't hurt with a python-dev pronouncement here.