I appreciate the responses from everyone. I knew I couldn't be the only who thought this behavior was unnecessarily limiting.
I found a ticket on the bug tracker. A patch was even submitted, but obviously it didn't make it into 3.3. Hopefully, it will make it into 3.4 with some prodding. http://bugs.python.org/issue9938 -- CPython 3.3.2 | Windows NT 6.2.9200 / FreeBSD 9.1 -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
