This is definately a bug in 3.1, for the same reason that a C program
uses the C locale until an explicit setlocale is done: otherwise, a
non-locale-aware program can run into bugs resulting from locale issues
when run under a different locale than that of the program author.

I have a memory of this being reported before somewhere and someone
tracking it down to a change in python initialization, but I can't find
a bug report and my google-foo is failing me.