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I checked the CVS and saw that it had not been touched,
which is why I supplied the patch to make it act in the same
manner as strings :)

The two options seems to be to either solve it in the manner
that my patch does or make both behave like in 2.3. 

While I realize that my opinion weighs light, not being part
of the coding team in any way, it seems to me like the road
of least surprise is the better way to go for a minor
release and that would be to not change the obviously
deliberate behaviour of the string object.

Well, that's my two cents :)