> As I understand the output of repr() is supposed to be something that can evaluated to recreate the same object.

Right, but that's an ideal that's not always achieved in practice. If I had my druthers, I'd 'fix' the repr of the complex object to return something that's written in terms of the constructor (for example, "complex(2.3, -0.0)"). I don't think that's a reasonable change from the POV of backwards compatibility though.