Change in behaviour of ORDER BY clause in PG7.3

Since upgrading to 7.3 I've noticed that the ORDER BY clause seems to
ignore leading spaces/punctuation for eg we have a simple table with 6
rows containing:

'a'
'b'
'c'
'd'
' bill'
'-bill'

SELECT * FROM table ORDER BY 1;

gives:

a
b
bill
-bill
c
d

which is different from previous versions and different to MySQL and SQL
Server. Is this a bug, or can you turn this behaviour off? It's breaking a
lot of our applications!

--
Ollie Clark - oliverc(at)comp(dot)leeds(dot)ac(dot)uk - ol(at)ollieclark(dot)com
http://www.ollieclark.com/acronyms.html