__dict__ attribute.  Deleting it, or setting it to a non-dictionary
result in a TypeError.  Note that getting it the first time magically
initializes it to an empty dict so that func.__dict__ will always
appear to be a dictionary (never None).

Closes SF bug #446645.

David Goodger.

David Bolen.

to the string module.  This was determined to be the right approach in
SF bug #226706.

Add dlopenflags to PyInterpreterState, and use it in dlopen calls.

- Change header to 2.2a1.
- Add separator between 2.2 and 2.1 news.

(Tim & I should agree on where to add new additions: I add them at the
top, Tim adds them at the bottom.  I like the top better because folks
who occasionally check out the NEWS file will see the latest news
first.)

mapping objects as an argument.

giving up the goods.
NEEDS DOC CHANGES

This completes the q/Q project.

longobject.c _PyLong_AsByteArray:  The original code had a gross bug:
the most-significant Python digit doesn't necessarily have SHIFT
significant bits, and you really need to count how many copies of the sign
bit it has else spurious overflow errors result.

test_struct.py:  This now does exhaustive std q/Q testing at, and on both
sides of, all relevant power-of-2 boundaries, both positive and negative.

NEWS:  Added brief dict news while I was at it.

native mode, and only when config #defines HAVE_LONG_LONG.  Standard mode
will eventually treat them as 8-byte ints across all platforms, but that
likely requires a new set of routines in longobject.c first (while
sizeof(long) >= 4 is guaranteed by C, there's nothing in C we can rely
on x-platform to hold 8 bytes of int, so we'll have to roll our own;
I'm thinking of a simple pair of conversion functions, Python long
to/from sized vector of unsigned bytes; that may be useful for GMP
conversions too; std q/Q would call them with size fixed at 8).

test_struct.py:  In addition to adding some native-mode 'q' and 'Q' tests,
got rid of unused code, and repaired a non-portable assumption about
native sizeof(short) (it isn't 2 on some Cray boxes).

libstruct.tex:  In addition to adding a bit of 'q'/'Q' docs (more needed
later), removed an erroneous footnote about 'I' behavior.

code, less memory.  Tests have uncovered no drawbacks.  Christian and
Vladimir are the other two people who have burned many brain cells on the
dict code in recent years, and they like the approach too, so I'm checking
it in without further ado.

_PyTuple_Resize().

instead of multiplication to generate the probe sequence.  The idea is
recorded in Python-Dev for Dec 2000, but that version is prone to rare
infinite loops.

The value is in getting *all* the bits of the hash code to participate;
and, e.g., this speeds up querying every key in a dict with keys
 [i << 16 for i in range(20000)] by a factor of 500.  Should be equally
valuable in any bad case where the high-order hash bits were getting
ignored.

Also wrote up some of the motivations behind Python's ever-more-subtle
hash table strategy.

now takes any iterable argument, not only sequences.

NEEDS DOC CHANGES -- but I don't think we settled on a concise way to
say this stuff.

*are* obsolete; three variables and the maketrans() function are not
(yet) obsolete.

Add a compensating warnings.filterwarnings() call to test_strop.py.

Add this to the NEWS.

elements when crunching a list, dict or tuple.  Now takes linear time
instead -- huge speedup for even moderately large containers, and the
code is notably simpler too.
Added some basic "is the output correct?" tests to test_pprint.

lines between paragraphs in Mark Hammond's news item about the default
encoding in posixmodule.  Resist the temptation to reflow paragraphs.