Minor edits; add an item

Doc/whatsnew/whatsnew25.tex

@@ -512,9 +512,9 @@ generators:
   \exception{GeneratorExit} or \exception{StopIteration}; catching the 
   exception and doing anything else is illegal and will trigger
   a \exception{RuntimeError}.  \method{close()} will also be called by 
-  Python's garbage collection when the generator is garbage-collected.
+  Python's garbage collector when the generator is garbage-collected.
 
-  If you need to run cleanup code in case of a \exception{GeneratorExit},
+  If you need to run cleanup code when a \exception{GeneratorExit} occurs,
   I suggest using a \code{try: ... finally:} suite instead of 
   catching \exception{GeneratorExit}.
 
@@ -1143,6 +1143,13 @@ added by Fredrik Lundh and Andrew Dalke at the NeedForSpeed
 sprint. Character map decoding was improved by Walter D\"orwald.)
 % Patch 1313939
 
+\item The \function{long(\var{str}, \var{base})} function is now
+faster on long digit strings because fewer intermediate results are
+calculated.  The peak is for strings of around 800--1000 digits where 
+the function is 6 times faster.
+(Contributed by Alan McIntyre and committed at the NeedForSpeed sprint.)
+% Patch 1442927
+
 \item The \module{struct} module now compiles structure format 
 strings into an internal representation and caches this
 representation, yielding a 20\% speedup.  (Contributed by Bob Ippolito