Thank you for the suggestion but in my mind that's not a viable workaround, and not just because of uglyness:  I'm using doctest to validate code examples, which are included in the documentation and are meant to be educational.  If I'd change my examples to match the pattern you suggest they might still serve their purpose as a test but they'd become useless as an example.

So it appears there is no real workaround for this issue.  Any chance we can get the patch into 2.7?

By the way, I said earlier that Barry suggested the ELLIPSIS workaround but it was actually ncoghlan who did so - apologies for the confusion.