There exists a standard for wide-character curses
(http://www.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/7908799/cursesix.html)
and at least ncurses implements it (almost completely;
you need to enable this when configuring it).  It is
essensial for getting the maximum of modern UTF-8
terminals (e.g. xterm).
It would make sense for python's curses module to
support all the wide functions on systems where the
wide curses interface is present, especially since
Python already supports unicode.