I don't think we should completely write off the possibility of doing this just because the *current* implementation is counter-intuitive. As I expressed in the original post, the explanation of this behavior is rather unsatisfying to newcomers.

Also @steven.daprano, please do not confuse one recommendation for implementation for the concept.

I agree that printing the Quitter object should not exit the interpreter. However, I disagree that "exit" should not be a special case. Specifically, when using the interactive interpreter the behavior (regardless of implementation strategy) would ideally be:

>>> exit
(interpreter exit)
>>> exit()
(interpreter exit)
>>> print(exit)
Call "exit()" to quit Python. When using the interactive interpreter you can simply type "exit".

This behavior closely matches IPython's behavior, and even a cursory search reveals not only individual users running into this and being frustrated, but even threads where this behavior has reached "meme status": https://twitter.com/0xabad1dea/status/1414204661360472065?s=19