The problem was that an exception can occur in the text.get() call or
in the write() call, when the text buffer contains non-ASCII
characters.  This causes the previous contents of the file to be lost.

The provisional fix is to call str(self.text.get(...)) *before*
opening the file, so that if the exception occurs, we never open the
file.

Two orthogonal better solutions have to wait for policy decisions:

1. We could try to encode the data as Latin-1 or as UTF-8; but that
   would require IDLE to grow a notion of file encoding which requires
   more thought.

2. We could make backups before overwriting a file.  This requires
   more thought because it needs to be fast and cross-platform and
   configurable.

complex_subtype_from_string():  this stopped parsing at the first 0
byte, as if that were the end of the input string.

Bugfix candidate.

Highlights: import and friends will understand any of \r, \n and \r\n
as end of line. Python file input will do the same if you use mode 'U'.
Everything can be disabled by configuring with --without-universal-newlines.

See PEP278 for details.

Added code to call this when PYMALLOC_DEBUG is enabled, and envar
PYTHONMALLOCSTATS is set, whenever a new arena is obtained and once
late in the Python shutdown process.

Put a bound on the number of frameobjects that can live in the
frameobject free_list.

Am also backporting to 2.2.  I don't intend to backport to 2.1 (too
much work -- lots of cyclic structures leak there, and the GC API).

methods.
Part of SF feature #444708.

Add optional arg to string methods strip(), lstrip(), rstrip().
The optional arg specifies characters to delete.

Also for UserString.

Still to do:

- Misc/NEWS
- LaTeX docs (I did the docstrings though)
- Unicode methods, and Unicode support in the string methods.

_PyObject_DebugMalloc:  explicitly cast PyObject_Malloc's result to the
target pointer type.

_PyObject_DebugDumpStats:  change decl of arena_alignment from unsigned
int to unsigned long.

This is for the 2.3 release only (it's new code).

(The real issue is whether modules can benefit from an alternate
implementation strategy rather than using a dictionary.  We should migrate
away from direct dictionary manipulation to allow more room for Jeremy to
flex the implementation with changes in globals lookup.)

Clean up the example of exporting a C-callable API from an extension module.
Add a hyperlink to a related section in the Python/C API reference.

PyModule_GetDict(), which is also more flexible: it does not assume that the
"module" is a real module.

Change a section title to fit in better.

The test function's signature should be

    test(methodname, input, output, *args)

but the output argument was omitted.  This caused all tests to fail,
because the expected output was passed as the initial argument to the
method call.  But because of the way the test works (it compares the
results for a regular string to the results for a UserString instance
with the same value, and it's OK if both raise the same exception) the
test never failed!

I've fixed this, and also cleaned up a few warts in the verbose
output.  Finally, I've made it possible to run the test stand-alone in
verbose mode by passing -v as a command line argument.

Now, the test will report failure related to zfill.  That's not my
fault, that's a legitimate problem: the string_tests.py file contains
a test for the zfill() method (just added) but this method is not
implemented.  The responsible party will surely fix this soon now.

- Added a debug class variable to enable parser debugging.