[Mark Dickinson]
> Python's current support for localization in int and float seems
> largely accidental, as far as I can tell.

[MAL]
> Not at all. [...]

Apologies;  'accidental' was a poor choice of word here.

> however, I did not look
> at things like decimal points, minus/plus signs, etc. at the
> time and only included support for numeric values associated
> with a number of code points, such as ½ for 1/2.

I'm less concerned about decimal points and the like, and more bothered by 
the fact that e.g., int(x, 16) accepts some, but not all, characters with 
the Hex_Digit property.  This seems counter to the intent of the Unicode 
standard.

[MAL]
> My suggestion is to wait for the Unicode locale project to collect
> locale based information on numeric formatting. [...]

Sounds fine to me.