After seeing issue #1761, I realized that there's a bug in the Decimal 
constructor:  it accepts newline-terminated strings:

>>> from decimal import *
>>> s = "2.3\n"
>>> Decimal(s)
Decimal("2.3")

I think this is, strictly speaking, a bug because:

(1) The IBM decimal specification explicitly disallows additional whitespace 
in a numeric string (see http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/daconvs.html),

(2) the operation to-number is supposed only to accept numeric strings, and

(3) Decimal.__new__ is currently the method that implements to-number.

Is this worth fixing?  This buggy behaviour might well be useful (e.g. to 
someone parsing a file with one Decimal per line).

I'll fix it if anyone thinks it's worth it.  Even if it should be fixed, I 
don't think this is worth backporting to Python 2.5, especially since it 
might break things.