> What's nuts is that the language doesn't guarantee that successive references to the same member value within the same function body are stable.

The language supports multiple threads and doesn’t have private fields (https://docs.python.org/3/tutorial/classes.html#private-vari...), so the runtime cannot rule out that the value gets changed in-between.

And yes, it often is obvious to humans that’s not intended to happen, and almost never what happens, but proving that is often hard or even impossible.

wouldn't a concurrent change without synchronization be UB anyway? Also parent wants to cache the address, not the value (but you have to cache the value if you want to optimize manually)