Isn't that the distinction between repr() and str()? That repr() is generally (to a greater extent) meant to return eval()-able code, while str() is just something nice to look at.
I don't think the # of pages it outputs should really matter, if the thing you are printing really is that big. It won't be much bigger than printing big lists or dicts, and we happily let those cause the terminal to scroll for minutes at a time if we accidentally print them. The default behavior (e.g. when you print() it or string-interpolate it) would still give you something short and nice to look at. Presumably when someone called repr() instead of str(), he was hoping for some sort of eval()-able code snippet.