I'm not a fan of using private functionality here; I'd rather this enum work the same way as an equivalent user-created way. If we think this is the right way to make an enum, we should make this decorator public.

My understanding is it's an intentionally internal-only decorator (eg used in ast and re). @ethanfurman is probably best placed to comment.

A

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I don't want to do this. If we think creating enum classes is too slow, we should make a public API for faster enums.

Creating enums with EnumType is definitely slower, and _simple_enum was created for stdlib use for areas where every bit of performance was desired (such as in enum.py itself, re, and a few others).