Since it is seemingly ignored in most of the comments on this thread, I just want to remind that PEP 285 http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0285/ says this:
In an ideal world, bool might be better implemented as a separate integer type that knows how to perform mixed-mode arithmetic. I mentioned Python 3000 since that is an opportunity for an ideal world. Cheers, Alan Isaac -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list