Yet another unicode WTF

[Lawrence D'Oliveiro]

In message <rNOSPAMon-E7E08B.18181804062009 at news.gha.chartermi.net>, Ron 
Garret wrote:

> Python 2.6.2 on OS X 10.5.7:

Same result, Python 2.6.1-3 on Debian Unstable. My $LANG is en_NZ.UTF-8.

> ... I always thought one of the fundamental
> invariants of unix processes was that there's no way for a process to
> know what's on the other end of its stdout.

Well, there have long been functions like isatty(3). That's probably what's 
involved here.