NEEDS DOC CHANGES.
This one surprised me! While I expected tuple() to be a no-brainer, turns
out it's actually dripping with consequences:
1. It will *allow* the popular PySequence_Fast() to work with any iterable
object (code for that not yet checked in, but should be trivial).
2. It caused two std tests to fail. This because some places used
PyTuple_Sequence() (the C spelling of tuple()) as an indirect way to test
whether something *is* a sequence. But tuple() code only looked for the
existence of sq->item to determine that, and e.g. an instance passed
that test whether or not it supported the other operations tuple()
needed (e.g., __len__). So some things the tests *expected* to fail
with an AttributeError now fail with a TypeError instead. This looks
like an improvement to me; e.g., test_coercion used to produce 559
TypeErrors and 2 AttributeErrors, and now they're all TypeErrors. The
error details are more informative too, because the places calling this
were *looking* for TypeErrors in order to replace the generic tuple()
"not a sequence" msg with their own more specific text, and
AttributeErrors snuck by that.
Neil Schemenauer
Tim Peters