Regardless of the value of .docstring change, it seems it had some unexpected consequences. I think providing a new mode for compile mulitline statements is a reasonable way to address those consequences going forward. That said, it's extremely late in the lifecycle of 3.7 to be thinking about new APIs. How about rolling back the whole .docstring change for 3.7? Then, it can be landed again with compile(..., mode='multiline) for 3.8.