[kbp]

I believe they're still object pointers in CPython, they're just ordinary singletons; in other implementations, they aren't even singletons. Python's object model doesn't have primitives. Adding special rules around them would significantly complicate the language as well as limit the implementors' ability to fiddle with the ranges of pre-allocated instances, for minimal benefit.

[coldtea]

>in other implementations, they aren't even singletons

That would have been less surprising (since for < 256 the singleton-ness means all same valued instances have the same "address" (id), so behave in equality check as if they were plain numbers).