patterns in a string, only the number needed by the max limit.

find

find helpers; updated unicodeobject to use stringlib_count

  (If compiled without FAST search support, changed the pre-memcmp test
   to check the last character as well as the first.  This gave a 25%
   speedup for my test case.)

Rewrote the split algorithms so they stop when maxsplit gets to 0.
Previously they did a string match first then checked if the maxsplit
was reached.  The new way prevents a needless string search.

from long ago and far away. Stop calling this pybench 1.4 because it
isn't. Remove the empty test, which was a bad idea.

feel free to add more tests and improve the documentation.

  invalid file paths for the built-in import machinery which leads to
  fewer open calls on startup.

  Also fix issue with PEP 302 style import hooks which lead to more open()
  calls than necessary.

the illusion of negative run times. Halt with an error if
run times go below 10 ms, indicating that results will be
unreliable.

broken, someone would have noticed by now ;-)

signed and unsigned integral types in comparisons.

so I'm writing this in latex now.

Skeleton for the ctypes reference.

Action verbose option correctly.
Tweak operation counts. Add empty and new instances tests.
Enable comparisons across different warp factors. Change version.

even with strip(..., 0)