character confusion

Just noticed something odd with a column of type "char". According to
the docs (and the way my old PG ran), the character data-type is
blank-padded. I'm not seeing that on one of my current machines (8.3.8)
or, perhaps I'm going blind on Friday. Was the definition of char changed?

Here is what I am seeing:

steve=> create temporary table foo (bar char(10));
CREATE TABLE
steve=> \d foo
       Table "pg_temp_2.foo"
 Column |     Type      | Modifiers
--------+---------------+-----------
 bar    | character(10) |

steve=> insert into foo values ('');
INSERT 0 1

steve=> insert into foo values ('asd');
INSERT 0 1

steve=> insert into foo values ('asdfasdf');
INSERT 0 1

steve=> insert into foo values ('asdfasdfas');
INSERT 0 1

steve=> insert into foo values ('asdfasdfasd');
ERROR:  value too long for type character(10)

steve=>=> select bar,length(bar),char_length(bar) from foo;
    bar     | length | char_length
------------+--------+-------------
            |      0 |           0
 asd        |      3 |           3
 asdfasdf   |      8 |           8
 asdfasdfas |     10 |          10
 select bar,length(bar) from foo;


Cheers,
Steve