I understand that the latest RFE in this issue is to provide a custom __repr__ to functools.partial.  Something along the lines of

class partial(functools.partial):
    def __repr__(self):
        return "functools.partial(%r, %s)" % (self.func, 
                      ', '.join(repr(a) for a in self.args)


>>> def f(x, y, z):
...   pass
>>> partial(f, 1, 2)
functools.partial(<function f at 0x10065b060>, 1, 2)

Looks like a reasonable proposal, but coding this in C is a chore. (The prototype above does not process keywords, so complete implementation is more involved.)