[I18n-sig] Python and Unicode == Britain and the Euro?

[Tim Peters]

[Paul Prescod]
> ...
> If you ask an Asian "what is Python's character set" they will either
> answer Latin 1 (which looks bad) or "Python has no native character set,
> only binary strings of bytes."

The Python Reference Manual says (chapter 2, "Lexical analysis"):

    Python uses the 7-bit ASCII character set for program text and
    string literals.

That was Guido's intent, and it's actually a bug that the parser uses
isalpha() etc (it wasn't intended to vary according to locale; locale was an
ANSI invention Guido didn't have in mind when that stuff was coded; and,
e.g., in some locales even characters like "|" meet the isalpha() test).