This came up in IPython & Jedi: several functions in inspect end up calling getfile(). If the object is something for which it can't find the source file, it throws an error, the message for which contains the object's repr.

This is problematic for us because for some objects the repr may be expensive to calculate (e.g. data tables where the repr forms primary output, not just debugging information). In some cases, it could also throw another error.

I plan to make a PR for this, but I'm opening an issue so I've got a bpo number.

https://github.com/ipython/ipython/issues/10493
https://github.com/davidhalter/jedi/issues/919