That was the original implementation, AFAICT from reading the ticketing. FORMAT_VALUE was introduced to fix a slight inconsistency where someone might monkey wi

That was the original implementation, AFAICT from reading the ticketing. FORMAT_VALUE was introduced to fix a slight inconsistency where someone might monkey with str.format(). While doing so, it was mentioned that there was a slight performance improvement to fewer lookups. See here for more info: https://bugs.python.org/issue25483 https://bugs.python.org/issue25483