is not supported on sets. (Unfortunately, sorting a list of sets may
still return random results because it uses < exclusively, but for
sets that inly implements a partial ordering. Oh well.)
into time. This is little more than *exporting* the datetimetz object
under the name "datetime", and similarly for timetz. A good implementation
of this change requires more work, but this is fully functional if you
don't stare too hard at the internals (e.g., right now a type named
"datetime" shows up as a base class of the type named "datetime"). The
docs also need extensive revision, not part of this checkin.
cases, plus even tougher tests of that. This implementation follows
the correctness proof very closely, and should also be quicker (yes,
I wrote the proof before the code, and the code proves the proof <wink>).
(or None) now. In 2.3a1 they could also return an int or long, but that
was an unhelpfully redundant leftover from an earlier version wherein
they couldn't return a timedelta. TOOWTDI.
Added the logging package. In the meantime, Neal Norwitz added a
test_logging.py to the std test suite, which would have caught this
oversight in the Windows installer.
compiler flags which are necessary to get a clean compile. The former is
for user-specified optimizer, debug, trace fiddling. See patch 640843.
Add /sw/lib and /sw/include to setup.py search paths on Darwin to take
advantage of fink goodies.
Add scriptsinstall target to Makefile to install certain scripts from
Tools/scripts directory.
env.
This adds @CFLAGS@ and @CPPFLAGS@ to the end of the respective
variable definitions. It also adds $(LDFLAGS) to the $(CC) invocation
to build $(PGEN).
module.
The code is shorter, more readable, faster, and dramatically increases the
range of acceptable dates.
Also, used the floor division operator in leapdays().
[ 643835 ] Set Next Statement for Python debuggers
with a few tweaks by me: adding an unsigned or two, mentioning that
not all jumps are allowed in the doc for pdb, adding a NEWS item and
a note to whatsnew, and AuCTeX doing something cosmetic to libpdb.tex.
[#521782] unreliable file.read() error handling
* Objects/fileobject.c
(file_read): Clear errors before leaving the loop in all situations,
and also check if some data was read before exiting the loop with an
EWOULDBLOCK exception.
* Doc/lib/libstdtypes.tex
* Objects/fileobject.c
Document that sometimes a read() operation can return less data than
what the user asked, if running in non-blocking mode.
* Misc/NEWS
Document the fix.
[#448679] Left to right
* Python/compile.c
(com_dictmaker): Reordered evaluation of dictionaries to follow strict
LTR evaluation.
* Lib/compiler/pycodegen.py
(CodeGenerator.visitDict): Reordered evaluation of dictionaries to
follow strict LTR evaluation.
* Doc/ref/ref5.tex
Documented the general LTR evaluation order idea.
* Misc/NEWS
Documented change in evaluation order of dictionaries.
[#636769] Fix for major rexec bugs
* Lib/rexec.py
(FileBase): Added 'xreadlines' and '__iter__' to allowed file methods.
(FileWrapper.__init__): Removed unnecessary self.f variable, which gave
direct access to the file object.
(RExec): Added 'xreadlines' and '_weakref' to allowed modules.
(RExec.r_open): Convert string subclasses to a real string classes
before doing comparisons with mode parameter.
* Lib/ihooks.py
(BasicModuleImporter.import_module/reload/unload): Convert the module
name to a real string before working with it.
(ModuleImporter.import_module/import_it/reload): Convert the module
name to a real strings before working with it.
* Misc/NEWS
Document the change.
supported as the second argument. This has the same meaning as
for isinstance(), i.e. issubclass(X, (A, B)) is equivalent
to issubclass(X, A) or issubclass(X, B). Compared to isinstance(),
this patch does not search the tuple recursively for classes, i.e.
any entry in the tuple that is not a class, will result in a
TypeError.
This closes SF patch #649608.
this can result in significantly smaller files. All classes as well as the
open function now accept an optional binary parameter, which defaults to
False for backward compatibility. Added a small test suite, updated the
libref documentation (including documenting the exported classes and fixing
a few other nits) and added a note about the change to Misc/NEWS.
[#495695] webbrowser.py: selection of browser
* Lib/webbrowser.py
Only include graphic browsers in _tryorder if DISPLAY is set. Also,
included skipstone support, as suggested by Fred in the mentioned bug.
* Misc/NEWS
Mention fix and skipstone inclusion.
whether this is a correct thing to do:
+ There are linker warnings (see PCbuild\readme.txt).
+ test_bsddb passes, in both release and debug builds now.
+ test_bsddb3 has several failures, but it did before too.
Also made pythoncore a dependency of the _bsddb project, updated
build instructions, added database conversion XXX to NEWS, and fiddled
the Windows installer accordingly.
+ News blurb, but as much XXX as news.
+ Updated installer (install the new bsddb package, and the Berkeley DLL;
still don't know how to fold that into _bsddb.pyd).
+ Fleshed out build instructions.
+ Debug Python still blows up.
Armin Rigo's Draconian but effective fix for
SF bug 453523: list.sort crasher
slightly fiddled to catch more cases of list mutation. The dreaded
internal "immutable list type" is gone! OTOH, if you look at a list
*while* it's being sorted now, it will appear to be empty. Better
than a core dump.
This bug happened because: 1) the scanner_search and scanner_match methods
were not checking the buffer limits before increasing the current pointer;
and 2) SRE_SEARCH was using "if (ptr == end)" as a loop break, instead of
"if (ptr >= end)".
* Modules/_sre.c
(SRE_SEARCH): Check for "ptr >= end" to break loops, so that we don't
hang forever if a pointer passing the buffer limit is used.
(scanner_search,scanner_match): Don't increment the current pointer
if we're going to pass the buffer limit.
* Misc/NEWS
Mention the fix.
* Lib/distutils/command/bdist_rpm.py
(bdist_rpm.initialize_options): Included verify_script attribute.
(bdist_rpm.finalize_package_data): Ensure that verify_script is a filename.
(bdist_rpm._make_spec_file): Included verify_script in script_options
tuple.
* Misc/NEWS
Mention change.
from Greg Chapman.
* Modules/_sre.c
(lastmark_restore): New function, implementing algorithm to restore
a state to a given lastmark. In addition to the similar algorithm used
in a few places of SRE_MATCH, restore lastindex when restoring lastmark.
(SRE_MATCH): Replace lastmark inline restoring by lastmark_restore(),
function. Also include it where missing. In SRE_OP_MARK, set lastindex
only if i > lastmark.
* Lib/test/re_tests.py
* Lib/test/test_sre.py
Included regression tests for the fixed bugs.
* Misc/NEWS
Mention fixes.
The last round boosted "the limit" from 2GB to 4GB. This round gets
rid of the 4GB limit. For files > 4GB, gzip stores just the last 32
bits of the file size, and now we play along with that too. Tested
by hand (on a 6+GB file) on Win2K.
Boosting from 2GB to 4GB was arguably enough "a bugfix". Going beyond
that smells more like "new feature" to me.
Fixed the signed/unsigned confusions when dealing with files >= 2GB.
4GB is still a hard limitation of the gzip file format, though.
Testing this was a bitch on Win98SE due to frequent system freezes. It
didn't freeze while running gzip, it kept freezing while trying to *create*
a > 2GB test file! This wasn't Python's doing. I don't know of a
reasonable way to test this functionality in regrtest.py, so I'm not
checking in a test case (a test case would necessarily require creating
a 2GB+ file first, using gzip to zip it, using gzip to unzip it again,
and then compare before-and-after; so >4GB free space would be required,
and a loooong time; I did all this "by hand" once).
Bugfix candidate, I guess.
sys.getwindowsversion() on Windows (new enahanced Tim-proof <wink>
version), and fix test_pep277.py in a few minor ways.
Including doc and NEWS entries.
fairly large, most are caused by reformatting section and subsection
headings. The changes fall into the following categories:
* reformatted section and subsection headers.
* escaped isolated asterisks which would be interpreted as starting bold
or italic text (e.g. "void (*)(PyObject \*)").
* quoted stuff that looks like internal references but isn't
(e.g. ``PyCmp_``).
* changed visually balanced quotes to just use apostrophes
(e.g. "'string'" instead of "`string'").
* introduced and indenting multiline chunks of code.
* created one table (search for "New codecs").
from SF patch http://www.python.org/sf/554192
This adds two new functions to mimetypes:
guess_all_extensions() which returns a list of all known
extensions for a mime type, and add_type() which adds one
mapping between a mime type and an extension.
interning. I modified Oren's patch significantly, but the basic idea
and most of the implementation is unchanged. Interned strings created
with PyString_InternInPlace() are now mortal, and you must keep a
reference to the resulting string around; use the new function
PyString_InternImmortal() to create immortal interned strings.
[ 587993 ] SET_LINENO killer
Remove SET_LINENO. Tracing is now supported by inspecting co_lnotab.
Many sundry changes to document and adapt to this change.
k_mul() when inputs have vastly different sizes, and a little more
efficient when they're close to a factor of 2 out of whack.
I consider this done now, although I'll set up some more correctness
tests to run overnight.
correct now, so added some final comments, did some cleanup, and enabled
it for all long-int multiplies. The KARAT envar no longer matters,
although I left some #if 0'ed code in there for my own use (temporary).
k_mul() is still much slower than x_mul() if the inputs have very
differenent sizes, and that still needs to be addressed.
SF 560379: Karatsuba multiplication.
Lots of things were changed from that. This needs a lot more testing,
for correctness and speed, the latter especially when bit lengths are
unbalanced. For now, the Karatsuba code gets invoked if and only if
envar KARAT exists.
PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErr(), PyErr_SetExcFromWindowsErrWithFilename().
Similar to PyErr_SetFromWindowsErrWithFilename() and
PyErr_SetFromWindowsErr(), but they allow to specify
the exception type to raise. Available on Windows.
See SF patch #576458.
more trivial lexical helper macros so that uses of these guys expand
to nothing at all when they're not enabled. This should help sub-
standard compilers that can't do a good job of optimizing away the
previous "(void)0" expressions.
Py_DECREF: There's only one definition of this now. Yay! That
was that last one in the family defined multiple times in an #ifdef
maze.
Py_FatalError(): Changed the char* signature to const char*.
_Py_NegativeRefcount(): New helper function for the Py_REF_DEBUG
expansion of Py_DECREF. Calling an external function cuts down on
the volume of generated code. The previous inline expansion of abort()
didn't work as intended on Windows (the program often kept going, and
the error msg scrolled off the screen unseen). _Py_NegativeRefcount
calls Py_FatalError instead, which captures our best knowledge of
how to abort effectively across platforms.
Repair segfaults and infinite loops in COUNT_ALLOCS builds in the
presence of new-style (heap-allocated) classes/types.
Bugfix candidate. I'll backport this to 2.2. It's irrelevant in 2.1.
This patch enhances Python/import.c/find_module() so
that unicode objects found in sys.path will be treated
as legal directory names (The current code ignores
anything that is not a str). The unicode name is
converted to str using Py_FileSystemDefaultEncoding.
library. Since multiple versions can be installed simultaneously, it's
crucial that you only select libraries and header files which are compatible
with each other. Version checking is done from highest version to lowest.
Building using version 1 of Berkeley DB is disabled by default because of
the hash file bugs people keep rediscovering. It can be enabled by
uncommenting a few lines in setup.py. Closes patch 553108.
This was a simple typo. Strange that the compiler didn't catch it!
Instead of WHY_CONTINUE, two tests used CONTINUE_LOOP, which isn't a
why_code at all, but an opcode; but even though 'why' is declared as
an enum, comparing it to an int is apparently not even worth a
warning -- not in gcc, and not in VC++. :-(
Will fix in 2.2 too.
[ 400998 ] experimental support for extended slicing on lists
somewhat spruced up and better tested than it was when I wrote it.
Includes docs & tests. The whatsnew section needs expanding, and arrays
should support extended slices -- later.
While I was at it, I added a tp_clear handler and changed the
tp_dealloc handler to use the clear_slots helper for the tp_clear
handler.
Also tightened the rules for slot names: they must now be proper
identifiers (ignoring the dirty little fact that <ctype.h> is locale
sensitive).
Also set mp->flags = READONLY for the __weakref__ pseudo-slot.
Most of this is a 2.2 bugfix candidate; I'll apply it there myself.
BOM_UTF32, BOM_UTF32_LE and BOM_UTF32_BE that represent the Byte
Order Mark in UTF-8, UTF-16 and UTF-32 encodings for little and
big endian systems.
The old names BOM32_* and BOM64_* were off by a factor of 2.
This closes SF bug http://www.python.org/sf/555360
Change the module constructor (module_init) to have the signature
__init__(name:str, doc=None); this prevents the call from type_new()
to succeed. While we're at it, prevent repeated calling of
module_init for the same module from leaking the dict, changing the
semantics so that __dict__ is only initialized if NULL.
Also adding a unittest, test_module.py.
This is an incompatibility with 2.2, if anybody was instantiating the
module class before, their argument list was probably empty; so this
can't be backported to 2.2.x.
[ 559250 ] more POSIX signal stuff
Adds support (and docs and tests and autoconfery) for posix signal
mask handling -- sigpending, sigprocmask and sigsuspend.
for 'str' and 'unicode', and can be used instead of
types.StringTypes, e.g. to test whether something is "a string":
isinstance(x, string) is True for Unicode and 8-bit strings. This
is an abstract base class and cannot be instantiated directly.
and the .seed() and .whseed() methods failed to reset it. In other
words, setting the seed didn't completely determine the sequence of
results produced by random.gauss(). It does now. Programs repeatedly
mixing calls to a seed method with calls to gauss() may see different
results now.
Bugfix candidate (random.gauss() has always been broken in this way),
despite that it may change results.
This now does a dynamic analysis of which elements are so frequently
repeated as to constitute noise. The primary benefit is an enormous
speedup in find_longest_match, as the innermost loop can have factors
of 100s less potential matches to worry about, in cases where the
sequences have many duplicate elements. In effect, this zooms in on
sequences of non-ubiquitous elements now.
While I like what I've seen of the effects so far, I still consider
this experimental. Please give it a try!
left and right type were of the same type and not classic instances.
This shortcut is dangerous for proxy types, because it means that
coerce(Proxy(1), Proxy(2.1)) leaves Proxy(1) unchanged rather than
turning it into Proxy(1.0).
In an ever-so-slight change of semantics, I now only take the shortcut
when the left and right types are of the same type and don't have the
CHECKTYPES feature. It so happens that classic instances have this
flag, so the shortcut is still skipped in this case (i.e. nothing
changes for classic instances). Proxies also have this flag set
(otherwise implementing numeric operations on proxies would become
nightmarish) and this means that the shortcut is also skipped there,
as desired. It so happens that int, long and float also have this
flag set; that means that e.g. coerce(1, 1) will now invoke
int_coerce(). This is fine: int_coerce() can deal with this, and I'm
not worried about the performance; int_coerce() is only invoked when
the user explicitly calls coerce(), which should be rarer than rare.
closes SF #514433
can now pass 'None' as the filename for the bsddb.*open functions,
and you'll get an in-memory temporary store.
docs are ripped out of the bsddb dbopen man page. Fred may want to
clean them up.
Considering this for 2.2, but not 2.1.
option. It was the cause of at least one way UNWISE.EXE could vanish
(install a python; uninstall it; install it again; reboot the machine;
abracadabra the uinstaller is gone).
Bugfix candidate, but I'll backport it myself.
Add a method zfill to str, unicode and UserString and change
Lib/string.py accordingly.
This activates the zfill version in unicodeobject.c that was
commented out and implements the same in stringobject.c. It also
adds the test for unicode support in Lib/string.py back in and
uses repr() instead() of str() (as it was before Lib/string.py 1.62)
when PyType_Ready() was called, if ob_type was found to be NULL, it
was always set to &PyType_Type; now it is set to base->ob_type,
where base is tp_base, defaulting to &PyObject_Type.
- PyType_Ready() accidentally did not inherit tp_is_gc; now it does.
Bugfix candidate.
This patch makes it possible to pass Warning instances as the first
argument to warnings.warn. In this case the category argument
will be ignored. The message text used will be str(warninginstance).
As promised in my response to the bug report, I'm not really fixing
it; in fact, one could argule over what the proper fix should do.
Instead, I'm adding a little magic that raises TypeError if you try to
pickle an instance of a class that has __slots__ but doesn't define or
override __getstate__. This is done by adding a bozo __getstate__
that always raises TypeError.
Bugfix candidate (also the checkin to typeobject.c, of course).
dropping MS's inadequate _chsize() function. This was inspired by
SF patch 498109 ("fileobject truncate support for win32"), which I
rejected.
libstdtypes.tex: Someone who knows should update the availability
blurb. For example, if it's available on Linux, it would be good to
say so.
test_largefile: Uncommented the file.truncate() tests, and reworked to
do more. The old comment about "permission errors" in the truncation
tests under Windows was almost certainly due to that the file wasn't open
for *write* access at this point, so of course MS wouldn't let you
truncate it. I'd be appalled if a Unixish system did.
CAUTION: Someone should run this test on Linux (etc) too. The
truncation part was commented out before. Note that test_largefile isn't
run by default.
helper module _ssl.
The support for the RAND_* APIs in _ssl is now only enabled
for OpenSSL 0.9.5 and up since they were added in that
release.
Note that socketmodule.* should really be renamed to _socket.* --
unfortunately, this seems to lose the CVS history of the file.
Please review and test... I was only able to test the header file
chaos in socketmodule.c/h on Linux. The test run through fine
and compiles don't give errors or warnings.
WARNING: This patch does *not* include changes to the various
non-Unix build process files.
where their capabilities intersect. Would be nice if people using non-
MSVC compilers (Borland etc) took a whack at doing something similar for
them (this code relies on the MS _cwait function).
Instead of sending the real user and host, use "anonymous@" (i.e. no
host name at all!) as the default anonymous FTP password. This avoids
privacy violations.
Removed the ancient "#define ANY void".
Bugfix candidate? Hard call. The bug report claims the existence of
this #define creates conflicts with other packages, which is easy to
believe. OTOH, some extension authors may still be relying on its
presence. I'm afraid you can't win on this one.
PyDict_UpdateFromSeq2(): removed it.
PyDict_MergeFromSeq2(): made it public and documented it.
PyDict_Merge() docs: updated to reveal <wink> that the second
argument can be any mapping object.
Anthony Roach.
Release the global interpreter lock around platform spawn calls.
Bugfix candidate? Hard to say; I favor "yes, bugfix".
These clearly *should* have been releasing the GIL all along, if for no
other reason than compatibility with the similar os.system(). But it's
possible some program out there is (a) multithreaded, (b) calling a spawn
function with P_WAIT, and (c) relying on the spawn call to block all their
threads until the spawned program completes. I think it's very unlikely
anyone is doing that on purpose, but someone may be doing so by accident.
Big Hammer to implement -Qnew as PEP 238 says it should work (a global
option affecting all instances of "/").
pydebug.h, main.c, pythonrun.c: define a private _Py_QnewFlag flag, true
iff -Qnew is passed on the command line. This should go away (as the
comments say) when true division becomes The Rule. This is
deliberately not exposed to runtime inspection or modification: it's
a one-way one-shot switch to pretend you're using Python 3.
ceval.c: when _Py_QnewFlag is set, treat BINARY_DIVIDE as
BINARY_TRUE_DIVIDE.
test_{descr, generators, zipfile}.py: fiddle so these pass under
-Qnew too. This was just a matter of s!/!//! in test_generators and
test_zipfile. test_descr was trickier, as testbinop() is passed
assumptions that "/" is the same as calling a "__div__" method; put
a temporary hack there to call "__truediv__" instead when the method
name is "__div__" and 1/2 evaluates to 0.5.
Three standard tests still fail under -Qnew (on Windows; somebody
please try the Linux tests with -Qnew too! Linux runs a whole bunch
of tests Windows doesn't):
test_augassign
test_class
test_coercion
I can't stay awake longer to stare at this (be my guest). Offhand
cures weren't obvious, nor was it even obvious that cures are possible
without major hackery.
Question: when -Qnew is in effect, should calls to __div__ magically
change into calls to __truediv__? See "major hackery" at tail end of
last paragraph <wink>.
It was easier than I thought, assuming that no other things contribute
to the instance size besides slots -- a pretty good bet. With a test
suite, no less!
happy if one could delete the __dict__ attribute of an instance. I
love to make Jim happy, so here goes...
- New-style objects now support deleting their __dict__. This is for
all intents and purposes equivalent to assigning a brand new empty
dictionary, but saves space if the object is not used further.
slot_tp_descr_set(): When deleting an attribute described by a
descriptor implemented in Python, the descriptor's __del__ method is
called by the slot_tp_descr_set dispatch function. This is bogus --
__del__ already has a different meaning. Renaming this use of __del__
is renamed to __delete__.
vgetargskeywords(): Now that this routine is checking for bad input
(rather than dump core in some cases), some bad calls are raising errors
that previously "worked". This patch makes the error strings more
revealing, and changes the exceptions from SystemError to RuntimeError
(under the theory that SystemError is more of a "can't happen!" assert-
like thing, and so inappropriate for bad arguments to a public C API
function).
special-cases classic classes, it doesn't do anything about other
cases where different metaclasses are involved (except for the trivial
case where one metaclass is a subclass of the others). Also note that
it's metaclass, not metatype.
This gives mmap() on Windows the ability to create read-only, write-
through and copy-on-write mmaps. A new keyword argument is introduced
because the mmap() signatures diverged between Windows and Unix, so
while they (now) both support this functionality, there wasn't a way to
spell it in a common way without introducing a new spelling gimmick.
The old spellings are still accepted, so there isn't a backward-
compatibility issue here.
and NEWS. Bugfix candidate? That's a dilemma for Anthony <wink>: /F
did fix a longstanding bug here, but the fix can cause code to raise an
exception that previously worked by accident.
XXX Remaining problems:
- The GC module doesn't know about these; I think it has its reasons
to disallow calling __del__, but for now, __del__ on new-style
objects is called when the GC module discards an object, for better
or for worse.
- The code to call a __del__ handler is really ridiculously
complicated, due to all the different debug #ifdefs. I've copied
this from the similar code in classobject.c, so I'm pretty sure I
did it right, but it's not pretty. :-(
- No tests yet.
outer level, the iterator protocol is used for memory-efficiency (the
outer sequence may be very large if fully materialized); at the inner
level, PySequence_Fast() is used for time-efficiency (these should
always be sequences of length 2).
dictobject.c, new functions PyDict_{Merge,Update}FromSeq2. These are
wholly analogous to PyDict_{Merge,Update}, but process a sequence-of-2-
sequences argument instead of a mapping object. For now, I left these
functions file static, so no corresponding doc changes. It's tempting
to change dict.update() to allow a sequence-of-2-seqs argument too.
Also changed the name of dictionary's keyword argument from "mapping"
to "x". Got a better name? "mapping_or_sequence_of_pairs" isn't
attractive, although more so than "mosop" <wink>.
abstract.h, abstract.tex: Added new PySequence_Fast_GET_SIZE function,
much faster than going thru the all-purpose PySequence_Size.
libfuncs.tex:
- Document dictionary().
- Fiddle tuple() and list() to admit that their argument is optional.
- The long-winded repetitions of "a sequence, a container that supports
iteration, or an iterator object" is getting to be a PITA. Many
months ago I suggested factoring this out into "iterable object",
where the definition of that could include being explicit about
generators too (as is, I'm not sure a reader outside of PythonLabs
could guess that "an iterator object" includes a generator call).
- Please check my curly braces -- I'm going blind <0.9 wink>.
abstract.c, PySequence_Tuple(): When PyObject_GetIter() fails, leave
its error msg alone now (the msg it produces has improved since
PySequence_Tuple was generalized to accept iterable objects, and
PySequence_Tuple was also stomping on the msg in cases it shouldn't
have even before PyObject_GetIter grew a better msg).
This adds unsetenv to posix, and uses it in the __delitem__ method of
os.environ.
(XXX Should we change the preferred name for putenv to setenv, for
consistency?)
This is a big one, touching lots of files. Some of the platforms
aren't tested yet. Briefly, this changes the return value of the
os/posix functions stat(), fstat(), statvfs(), fstatvfs(), and the
time functions localtime(), gmtime(), and strptime() from tuples into
pseudo-sequences. When accessed as a sequence, they behave exactly as
before. But they also have attributes like st_mtime or tm_year. The
stat return value, moreover, has a few platform-specific attributes
that are not available through the sequence interface (because
everybody expects the sequence to have a fixed length, these couldn't
be added there). If your platform's struct stat doesn't define
st_blksize, st_blocks or st_rdev, they won't be accessible from Python
either.
(Still missing is a documentation update.)
This changes Pythread_start_thread() to return the thread ID, or -1
for an error. (It's technically an incompatible API change, but I
doubt anyone calls it.)
call, or via setting an instance or class vrbl.
Rewrote the calibration docs.
Modern boxes are so friggin' fast, and a profiler event does so much work
anyway, that the cost of looking up an instance vrbl (the bias constant)
per profile event just isn't a big deal.
actual run of the profiler, instead of timing a simplified simulation of
part of what the profiler does. It computes a constant about 60% higher
on my Win98SE box than the old method, and the new constant appears much
more realistic. Deleted the undocumented simple(), instrumented(), and
profiler_simulation() methods (which existed only to support the previous
calibration method).