tried to update one item in a tuple.

this is on par with a corresponding find, and nearly twice as fast
as split(sep, 1)

full tests, a unicode version, and documentation will follow to-
morrow.

The SIGCHECK macro defined here has always been bizarre, but
it apparently causes compiler warnings on "Sun Studio 11".
I believe the warnings are bogus, but it doesn't hurt to make
the macro definition saner.

Bugfix candidate (but I'm not going to bother).

use the Windows time.clock() implementation on Win64.

QueryPerformanceCounter(), but we believe Win64 does
support it now.  So use in time.clock().

It would be peachy if someone with a Win64 box tried
this ;-)

Change test_values so that it compares the lowercasing of group names since getgrall() can return all lowercase names while getgrgid() returns proper casing.

Discovered on Ubuntu 5.04 (custom).

tp_compare to tp_richcompare ;)

Use LONG_MIN and LONG_MAX to check Python integer bounds instead of the incorrect INT_MIN and INT_MAX

with PyObject_CallFunctionObjArgs, which is 30% faster.

Struct now unpacks to PY_LONG_LONG directly when possible, also include #ifdef'ed out code that will return int instead of long when in bounds (not active since it's an API and doc change)

related tests are now about 10x faster.

new string is over max Py_ssize_t.  I have no way to test it on my
box or any box I have access to.  At least it doesn't break anything.

Now using PyInt_FromSsize_t.

for the related stringbench tests.

made a copy of the string using PyString_FromStringAndSize(s, n) and modify
the copied string in-place.  However, 1 (and 0) character strings are shared
from a cache.  This cause "A".replace("A", "a") to change the cached version
of "A" -- used by everyone.

Now may the copy with NULL as the string and do the memcpy manually.  I've
added regression tests to check if this happens in the future.  Perhaps
there should be a PyString_Copy for this case?

both mystrtoul.c and longobject.c.  Share the table instead.  Also
cut its size by 64 entries (they had been used for an inscrutable
trick originally, but the code no longer tries to use that trick).

now about 3x faster on my machine, for the replace tests from string-
bench.