Feature or enhancement

Proposal:

Python currently interns certain strings, such as keywords and some ASCII/Unicode characters, as well as module-specific strings. I propose extending this interning mechanism to the string representations of operators (e.g.,"+=","==","|=").

Rationale:
Interning these strings could improve performance, particularly in code parsing workflows, by:

• Reducing memory overhead for repeated operator strings.
• Accelerating string comparisons (e.g., during AST construction or bytecode generation).

Target Symbols:
The following multi-character syntactic literals (withlen() > 1) are candidates for interning:

# Syntax literals  '...', '->' # Operators  '**', '//', '==', '!=', '>=', '<=', ':=',  '+=', '-=', '*=', '/=', '//=', '%=', '**=',  '<<', '>>', '<<=', '>>=', '&=', '|=', '^='  # And maybe character sequence that used in REPL?'>>>'

Proof of Concept:
A preliminary implementation is availablehere, demonstrating the feasibility of this change.

Considerations:

• The change would be low-risk, as it targets immutable, statically known strings.
• The impact on startup time and memory usage should be negligible, given the small set of operators.

Would this be a worthwhile optimization for CPython? I’d appreciate feedback on the idea and the PoC.

Has this already been discussed elsewhere?

This is a minor feature, which does not need previous discussion elsewhere

Links to previous discussion of this feature:

No response