> I would not consider this a bug in Python, but rather in the locale settings passed to setlocale().

Past 10 years, I repeated to every single user I met that "Python 3 is right, your system setup is wrong". But that's a waste of time. People continue to associate Python3 and Unicode to annoying bugs, because they don't understand how locales work.

Instead of having to repeat to each user that "hum, maybe your config is wrong", I prefer to support this non convential setup and work as expected ("it just works"). With my latest implementation, setlocale() is only done when LC_CTYPE and LC_NUMERIC are different, which is the corner case which "shouldn't occur in practice".