[Ping]
This would be another motivation for Python to carefully separate the three types of equality:
is identity-equal == value-equal <=> magnitude-equal
We currently don't distinguish between the last two; the operator "<=>" is my proposal for how to spell "magnitude-equal", and in terms of outward behaviour you can consider (a <=> b) to be (a <= b and a >= b). I suspect we will find ourselves needing it if we do rich comparisons anyway.
I don't think that this form of equality deserves its own operator. The Unicode comparison rules are sufficiently hairy that it seems better to implement them separately, either in a separate module or at least as a Unicode-object-specific method, and let the == operator do what it does best: compare the representations. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)