loss for no reason.

test dramatically:

    class T(tuple): __dynamic__ = 1
    t = T(range(1000))
    for i in range(1000): tt = tuple(t)

The speedup was about 5x compared to the previous state of CVS (1.7
vs. 8.8, in arbitrary time units).  But it's still more than twice as
slow as as the same test with __dynamic__ = 0 (0.8).

I'm not sure that I really want to go through the trouble of this kind
of speedup for every slot.  Even doing it just for the most popular
slots will be a major effort (the new slot_sq_item is 40+ lines, while
the old one was one line with a powerful macro -- unfortunately the
speedup comes from expanding the macro and doing things in a way
specific to the slot signature).

An alternative that I'm currently considering is sketched in PLAN.txt:
trap setattr on type objects.  But this will require keeping track of
all derived types using weak references.

Taught doctest about static methods, class methods, and property docstrings
in new-style classes.  As for inspect.py/pydoc.py before it, the new stuff
needed didn't really fit into the old architecture (but was less of a
strain to force-fit here).
New-style class docstrings still aren't found, but that's the subject
of a different bug and I want to fix that right instead of hacking around
it in doctest.

Add more detail about the speed optimizations needed for __dynamic__.
The weak reference solution becomes more attractive...

pointing to a static variable to hold the object form of the string
was never used, causing endless calls to PyString_InternFromString().
One particular test (with lots of __getitem__ calls) became a third
faster with this!

Another installment; the new functionality wasn't actually enabled in
normal use, only in the strained use checked by the test case.

Unknown whether this fixes it.
- stringobject.c, PyString_FromFormatV:  don't assume that va_list is of
  a type that can be copied via an initializer.
- errors.c, PyErr_Format:  add a va_end() to balance the va_start().

instances).

Also added GC support to various auxiliary types: super, property,
descriptors, wrappers, dictproxy.  (Only type objects have a tp_clear
field; the other types are.)

One change was necessary to the GC infrastructure.  We have statically
allocated type objects that don't have a GC header (and can't easily
be given one) and heap-allocated type objects that do have a GC
header.  Giving these different metatypes would be really ugly: I
tried, and I had to modify pickle.py, cPickle.c, copy.py, add a new
invent a new name for the new metatype and make it a built-in, change
affected tests...  In short, a mess.  So instead, we add a new type
slot tp_is_gc, which is a simple Boolean function that determines
whether a particular instance has GC headers or not.  This slot is
only relevant for types that have the (new) GC flag bit set.  If the
tp_is_gc slot is NULL (by far the most common case), all instances of
the type are deemed to have GC headers.  This slot is called by the
PyObject_IS_GC() macro (which is only used twice, both times in
gcmodule.c).

I also changed the extern declarations for a bunch of GC-related
functions (_PyObject_GC_Del etc.): these always exist but objimpl.h
only declared them when WITH_CYCLE_GC was defined, but I needed to be
able to reference them without #ifdefs.  (When WITH_CYCLE_GC is not
defined, they do the same as their non-GC counterparts anyway.)

Tim Hochberg.  Doctest no longer searches imported objects.

- The test for deepcopy() in pickles() was indented wrongly, so it got
  run twice (one for binary pickle mode, one for text pickle mode; but
  the test doesn't depend on the pickle mode).

- In verbose mode, show which subtest (pickle/cPickle/deepcopy, text/bin).

in run_test() referenced two non-existent variables, and in
non-verbose mode, the tests didn't report the actual number, when it
differed from the expected number.  Fixed this.

Also added an extra call to gc.collect() at the start of test_all().
This will be needed when I check in the changes to add GC to new-style
classes.

"from xml.parsers import expat" succeeds but the imported expat module
is an empty shell.  Make sure we don't be fooled by that.

is not found).  Being fancy: insert the first 3 characters of
sys.version in the URL.

from Tim Hochberg.  Also mucho fiddling to change the way doctest
determines whether a thing is a function, module or class.  Under 2.2,
this really requires the functions in inspect.py (e.g., types.ClassType
is close to meaningless now, if not outright misleading).

public interface, so we can simplify the documentation.

try to explain the complex general scheme we actually use now, I decided
to spell out only what equality means (which is easy to explain and
intuitive), leaving the other outcomes unspecified beyond consistency.

The patch repaired internal gcc compiler errors on BeOS.
This checkin repairs them in a simpler way, by explicitly casting the
platform INFINITY to double.

added local escape method (made the dumps method some 50-80% faster)
minor tweaks to the unmarshalling code

Patch from Steve Scott to add SIGBREAK support (unique to Windows).

top level.

- SLOT1BINFULL() macro: changed this to check for __rop__ overriding
  __op__, like binary_op1() in abstract.c -- the latter only calls the
  slot function once if both types use the same slot function, so the
  slot function must make both calls -- which it already did for the
  __op__, __rop__ order, but not yet for the __rop__, __op__ order
  when B.__class__ is a subclass of A.__class__.

- slot_sq_contains(), slot_nb_nonzero(): use lookup_maybe() rather
  than lookup_method() which sets an exception which we then clear.

- slot_nb_coerce(): don't give up when left argument's __coerce__
returns NotImplemented, but give the right argument a chance.

(to see whether __rop__ should go before __op__) only when slotv is
set.  This saves a test+branch when only slotw is set.

"boolean" --> "Boolean" (per the style guide).

as container objects rather than as mapping objects (in the index entries).
Change the section heading and intro sentence to be a little more general,
since that's how things have actually evolved.

  I modified nntplib so the body method can accept an
  optional second parameter pointing to a filehandle or
  filename (string). This way, really long body
  articles can be stored to disk instead of kept in
  memory. The way I made the modification should make
  it easy to extend this functionality to other extended
  return methods.