Python 1.6a2 Unicode bug (was Re: comparing strings and ints)

[Just van Rossum]

I wrote:
>A utf-8-encoded 8-bit string in Python is *not* a string, but a "ByteArray".

Another way of putting this is:
- utf-8 in an 8-bit string is to a unicode string what a pickle is to an
object.
- defaulting to utf-8 upon coercing is like implicitly trying to unpickle
an 8-bit string when comparing it to an instance. Bad idea.

Defaulting to Latin-1 is the only logical choice, no matter how
western-culture-centric this may seem.

Just