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.
- The socket module now provides the functions inet_pton and inet_ntop
for converting between string and packed representation of IP addresses.
See SF patch #658327.
This still needs a bit of work in the doc area, because it is not
available on all platforms (especially not on Windows).
* Adds missing pop() methods to weakref.py
* Expands test suite to broaden coverage of objects with
a mapping interface.
Contributed by Sebastien Keim.
extension implemented flush() was fixed. Scott also rewrite the
zlib test suite using the unittest module. (SF bug #640230 and
patch #678531.)
Backport candidate I think.
This can cause core dumps when Python runs. Python relies on the 754-
(and C99-) mandated default "non-stop" mode for FP exceptions. This
patch from Ben Laurie disables at least one FP exception on FreeBSD at
Python startup time.