@steven.daprano I appreciate your perspective but you laid out a lot of strong opinions as if they're incontrovertible truths.

The motivation here isn't laziness- I created this bug because I saw actual people across various skill levels that are bugged by this behavior. I don't think that I can accept your declaration that changing this behavior would be user hostile in the face of multiple pieces of user feedback that says the existing behavior is hostile and changing it would be an improvement.

It's not about saving two characters. It's about doing what the user actual means and expects- based on feedback it seems that almost everyone expects "exit" to exit. Your point about being able to inspect objects falls a bit flat when the current behavior is:

>>> exit
Use exit() or Ctrl-D (i.e. EOF) to exit

If I weren't an experienced Python developer, I would have no idea that "exit" is actually an object and its __repr__ is what's showing there. To those who haven't ascended to language experts, this just seems like the program chiding us - like responding to "can I have some water" with "*may* you have some water". I didn't type "exit" to view the exit object, I typed it to leave the interpreter. If I *do* want to inspect it, well, there's dir() and help(), which are far, far more useful than the __repr__.