which can be reviewed via
http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Python/comp.lang.python/2003-12/1011.html
Duncan Booth investigated, and discovered that an "optimisation" was
in fact a pessimisation for small numbers of elements in a source list,
compared to not having the optimisation, although with large numbers
of elements in the source list the optimisation was quite beneficial.
He posted his change to comp.lang.python (but not to SF).
Further research has confirmed his assessment that the optimisation only
becomes a net win when the source list has more than 100 elements.
I also found that the optimisation could apply to tuples as well,
but the gains only arrive with source tuples larger than about 320
elements and are nowhere near as significant as the gains with lists,
(~95% gain @ 10000 elements for lists, ~20% gain @ 10000 elements for
tuples) so I haven't proceeded with this.
The code as it was applied the optimisation to list subclasses as
well, and this also appears to be a net loss for all reasonable sized
sources (~80-100% for up to 100 elements, ~20% for more than 500
elements; I tested up to 10000 elements).
Duncan also suggested special casing empty lists, which I've extended
to all empty sequences.
On the basis that list_fill() is only ever called with a list for the
result argument, testing for the source being the destination has
now happens before testing source types.
* in py-checker-run, fall back to read-string if read-shell-command
(XEmacs-specific) is not available.
* highlight variables would mask builtins as if they were keywords.
Original idea by Guido van Rossum.
Idea for skipable inner iterators by Raymond Hettinger.
Idea for argument order and identity function default by Alex Martelli.
Implementation by Hye-Shik Chang (with tweaks by Raymond Hettinger).
comments about why both calls to cyclic gc here can cause problems.
I'll backport to 2.3 maint. Since the calls were introduced in 2.3,
that will be the end of it.
and left shifts. (Thanks to Kalle Svensson for SF patch 849227.)
This addresses most of the remaining semantic changes promised by
PEP 237, except for repr() of a long, which still shows the trailing
'L'. The PEP appears to promise warnings for operations that
changed semantics compared to Python 2.3, but this is not
implemented; we've suffered through enough warnings related to
hex/oct literals and I think it's best to be silent now.
by the function object or by the method object, the function
object's attribute usually wins. Christian Tismer pointed out that
that this is really a mistake, because this only happens for special
methods (like __reduce__) where the method object's version is
really more appropriate than the function's attribute. So from now
on, all method attributes will have precedence over function
attributes with the same name.
Also SF patch 843455.
This is a critical bugfix.
I'll backport to 2.3 maint, but not beyond that. The bugs this fixes
have been there since weakrefs were introduced.
* Install the unittests, docs, newsitem, include file, and makefile update.
* Exercise the new functions whereever sets.py was being used.
Includes the docs for libfuncs.tex. Separate docs for the types are
forthcoming.
subtype_dealloc(): This left the dying object exposed to gc, so that
if cyclic gc triggered during the weakref callback, gc tried to delete
the dying object a second time. That's a disaster. subtype_dealloc()
had a (I hope!) unique problem here, as every normal dealloc routine
untracks the object (from gc) before fiddling with weakrefs etc. But
subtype_dealloc has obscure technical reasons for re-registering the
dying object with gc (already explained in a large comment block at
the bottom of the function).
The fix amounts to simply refraining from reregistering the dying object
with gc until after the weakref callback (if any) has been called.
This is a critical bug (hard to predict, and causes seemingly random
memory corruption when it occurs). I'll backport it to 2.3 later.