Re: But but
It was c purity they were trying to maintain, as also shown by the <> != change, and the insistence at the time that the c library was the only possible way to do math (thankfully abandoned soon after, but following years of amazing blindness)
The people who maintained python-written-in-c were really c programmers at heart, and at the time of the fork between 2.x and 3.0, their idea of what a language should look like was still defined by c.