> Looks like this bug is CPython-specific, others (Jython, IronPython...) don't have it, so people will move code that depends on the internal optimization to other pythons that DO have it. :)

I don't know about IronPython, but Jython and PyPy have same behavior as CPython.

Even if the proposed implementation returns same result for common types, it may have different behavior for user types. Such changes should not do in bugfix releases, this is a new feature. I think that it is worthwhile to discuss the idea at first in the Python-Ideas mailing list [1]. But I suspect that most core developers will agree with Terry.

[1] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas