most significantly apply a modified portion of the patch from #4242 with
patches for skipping implementation details

to return different information than the _sys_version() output
used in previous Python versions.

This also fixes issue5561: platform.python_version_tuple returns tuple of ints, should be strings

Added more tests for the various platform functions.

It seems my love of PEP 8 overrode the need for consistentcy

patch by myself #1034053