using a custom, nearly-identical macro. This probably changes how some of
these functions are compiled, which may result in fractionally slower (or
faster) execution. Considering the nature of traversal, visiting much of the
address space in unpredictable patterns, I'd argue the code readability and
maintainability is well worth it ;P

Convert Py_ssize_t using PyInt_FromSsize_t

http://mail.python.org/pipermail/python-dev/2006-February/060524.html

(Contributed by Dima Dorfman)

* Document the differences between them
* Fix corner cases covered by the unittests
* Use Py_RETURN_NONE where possible for dictionaries

to more accurately describe what the function does.

Suggested by Thomas Wouters.

Factors out the common case of returning self.

-- replace then with slightly faster PyObject_Call(o,a,NULL).  (The
difference is that the latter requires a to be a tuple; the former
allows other values and wraps them in a tuple if necessary; it
involves two more levels of C function calls to accomplish all that.)

tupleobject.c. Makes the code in iterobject.c cleaner
and speeds-up the general case by not checking for
tuples everytime.   SF Patch #592065.

object references (it_seq for seqiterobject, it_callable and
it_sentinel for calliterobject) when the end of the list is reached.

Also remove the next() methods -- one is supplied automatically by
PyType_Ready() because the tp_iternext slot is set.  That's a good
thing, because the implementation given here was buggy (it never
raised StopIteration).

Avoid checks for negative indices and duplicate checks for support of
the sequence protocol.

sees it (test_iter.py is unchanged).

- Added a tp_iternext slot, which calls the iterator's next() method;
  this is much faster for built-in iterators over built-in types
  such as lists and dicts, speeding up pybench's ForLoop with about
  25% compared to Python 2.1.  (Now there's a good argument for
  iterators. ;-)

- Renamed the built-in sequence iterator SeqIter, affecting the C API
  functions for it.  (This frees up the PyIter prefix for generic
  iterator operations.)

- Added PyIter_Check(obj), which checks that obj's type has a
  tp_iternext slot and that the proper feature flag is set.

- Added PyIter_Next(obj) which calls the tp_iternext slot.  It has a
  somewhat complex return condition due to the need for speed: when it
  returns NULL, it may not have set an exception condition, meaning
  the iterator is exhausted; when the exception StopIteration is set
  (or a derived exception class), it means the same thing; any other
  exception means some other error occurred.