> I suspect that literal_eval, on the other hand, should reproduce what the interpreter does
I think that's going to be awkward to achieve without making the behaviour of literal_eval significantly less obvious and more DWIMmy. And I'm not convinced that `literal_eval` should follow the behaviour of the complex constructor rather than the behaviour of plain `eval`.
Of course, the "right" fix here is to change the complex repr entirely so that it looks like the compound object that it is rather than an eval-able expression:
>>> repr(1+2j)
complex(1.0, 2.0)
That would break backwards compatibility, but given the number of times complaints come up on this tracker, I'm beginning to think it might be worth it.