Obsolesence of <>

[Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters]

tanzer at swing.co.at (Christian Tanzer) wrote:
  Just try:

  >>> "öäb" == u"abc"
  Traceback (most recent call last):
    File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
  UnicodeError: ASCII decoding error: ordinal not in range(128)

  :(

Hmmm...  I don't see those funny characters with the dots on top
*anywhere* on my keyboard :-).

Unfortunately though, the characters 'c','h','r','(','1','2','8',')' all
do appear on my keyboard, so I still have the problem in the manner Tim
Peters observed.

So the next obvious question:  WHY is this error raised?!

I actually -had- seen it before, but repressed my memory of it, since it
seemed so ugly and unnecessary.  Comparisons seem to be getting much
poorer as Python version numbers increase, not richer :-(.

Yours, Lulu...