Indeed, it accepts parentheses in 2.6 now, but not in 2.5 or earlier.

Why not the other way round?  Somewhere there has to be a limit.  And if
you write down complex numbers you usually have the imaginary part after
the real part.

But let's try no to make this a bikeshed discussion.  If you say that
literal_eval can safely evaluate the repr() of builtins (with the
notable exception of reprs that eval can't evaluate either [like nan,
inf etc.]) and probably a bit more it should be fine :)