The idea is Marc-Andre Lemburg's, the implementation is Tim's.
Add a new ma_smalltable member to dictobjects, an embedded vector of
MINSIZE (8) dictentry structs.  Short course is that this lets us avoid
additional malloc(s) for dicts with no more than 5 entries.

The changes are widespread but mostly small.

Long course:  WRT speed, all scalar operations (getitem, setitem, delitem)
on non-empty dicts benefit from no longer needing NULL-pointer checks
(ma_table is never NULL anymore).  Bulk operations (copy, update, resize,
clearing slots during dealloc) benefit in some cases from now looping
on the ma_fill count rather than on ma_size, but that was an unexpected
benefit:  the original reason to loop on ma_fill was to let bulk
operations on empty dicts end quickly (since the NULL-pointer checks
went away, empty dicts aren't special-cased any more).

Special considerations:

For dicts that remain empty, this change is a lose on two counts:
the dict object contains 8 new dictentry slots now that weren't
needed before, and dict object creation also spends time memset'ing
these doomed-to-be-unsused slots to NULLs.

For dicts with one or two entries that never get larger than 2, it's
a mix:  a malloc()/free() pair is no longer needed, and the 2-entry case
gets to use 8 slots (instead of 4) thus decreasing the chance of
collision.  Against that, dict object creation spends time memset'ing
4 slots that aren't strictly needed in this case.

For dicts with 3 through 5 entries that never get larger than 5, it's a
pure win:  the dict is created with all the space they need, and they
never need to resize.  Before they suffered two malloc()/free() calls,
plus 1 dict resize, to get enough space.  In addition, the 8-slot
table they ended with consumed more memory overall, because of the
hidden overhead due to the additional malloc.

For dicts with 6 or more entries, the ma_smalltable member is wasted
space, but then these are large(r) dicts so 8 slots more or less doesn't
make much difference.  They still benefit all the time from removing
ubiquitous dynamic null-pointer checks, and get a small benefit (but
relatively smaller the larger the dict) from not having to do two
mallocs, two frees, and a resize on the way *to* getting their sixth
entry.

All in all it appears a small but definite general win, with larger
benefits in specific cases.  It's especially nice that it allowed to
get rid of several branches, gotos and labels, and overall made the
code smaller.

isabs() (no false results were checked) and splitdrive().

Update to reflect using "" as the default value for the second parameter
to the get() method.

setdefault() the empty string.  In setdefault(), use + to join the value
to create the entry for the headers attribute so that TypeError is raised
if the value is of the wrong type.

When regrtest.py finds an attribute "test_main" in a test it imports,
regrtest runs the test's test_main after the import.  test_threaded_import
needs this else the cross-thread import lock prevents it from making
progress.  Other tests can use this hack too, but I doubt it will ever be
popular.

This should be faster.

This means:

(1) "for line in file:" won't work if the xreadlines module can't be
    imported.

(2) The body of "for line in file:" shouldn't use the file directly;
    the effects (e.g. of file.readline(), file.seek() or even
    file.tell()) would be undefined because of the buffering that goes
    on in the xreadlines module.

ought to be faster.

instead.  Allows this test to finish on Windows again.

localization of month and day names.

when #ifdef was needed.

This closes (reallu!) SF bug #417418.

add a list of the mapping methods which are not supported (per Barry's
comments).

objects.

rfc822.Message objects, based on comments from Barry.

for loading modules from the application resource fork stopped working
when sys.path component normalization was implemented. Comparison
of sys.path components is now done by FSSpec in stead of by pathname.

ICK ALERT:  read the long comment block before run_the_test().  It was
almost impossible to get this to run without instant deadlock, and the
solution here sucks on several counts.  If you can dream up a better way,
let me know!

numbers that display nicely after repr().  From much doctest experience
with the same trick, I believe people find examples with simple fractions
easier to understand too:  they can usually check the results in their
head, and so feel confident about what they're seeing.  Not even I get a
warm feeling from a result that looks like 70330.345024097141 ...

prototype, for gcc -Wstrict-prototypes.

pointers to information about the other mailbox formats; if anyone can
provide the information needed, please let me know!

test; there is no need to store this in a file if the actual test code
does not produce any output.

contains a single line of text giving the name of the output file.  This
covers all tests that do not actually produce any output in the test code.

    delete ones that can't be imported due to missing symbols or other
    causes.

UTF-16 codec will now interpret and remove a *leading* BOM mark. Sub-
sequent BOM characters are no longer interpreted and removed.
UTF-16-LE and -BE pass through all BOM mark characters.

These changes should get the UTF-16 codec more in line with what
the Unicode FAQ recommends w/r to BOM marks.

for the Maildir mailbox format.  This still does not address other mailbox
formats.

basically accept <!...> where the dots can be single- or double-quoted
strings or any other character except >.

Background: I found a real-life example that failed to parse with
the old assumption: http://www.opensource.org/licenses/jabberpl.html
contains a few constructs of the form <![if !supportLists]>...<![endif]>.

indicate it took an argument.  This closes SF patch #402223 by Bastian
Kleineidam.

indicating whether the entry was extracted from a docstring or not.

write(): If any of the locations of a string appearance came from a
docstring, add a comment such as

#. docstring

before the references (after a suggestion by Martin von Loewis).

first by filename and then by line number.  Closes SF patch #425821.

Also, fixes a problem with duplicate entries.

floating point numbers in an interactive example.


Added comment to help explain control flow in the example code showing
how to check if a number is prime.

This closes SF bugs 419434 and 424552.