Rather than see statistics, I'm curious about what circumstances where the optimization would kick in.   Interned strings are pre-hashed but they already benefit from an identity-implies-equality check.  Dicts and sets already incorporate a check-hash-before-equality check.

That raises the question of what strings ever have had their hash already computed if the string hasn't been interned or has been used in a dict or set?

P.S.  I rather like the optimization and don't want to discourage it.  I'm just curious about what the current optimizations are missing.