No, it's legacy behavior and the community took the opportunity to fix it in Python 3, where it raises a SyntaxError.

Python 2 has _many_ quirks like this one. Python 3 was not just "it's unicode".

It’s, IMHO, a terrible idea but the one use I could imagine is if you are doing a lot of stuff with Unix exit codes, where exit code 0 is success. That would cover setting True = 0 ...maybe but not failure which is usually a positive exit code.

No! Actually I take it back this _is_ definitely still a terrible idea and will lead to certain madness for all involved. :)

No.