the code so that the most frequent cases come first.  Added comments.
Found a hidden assumption that a pool contains room for at least two
blocks, and added an assert to catch a violation if it ever happens in
a place where that matters.  Gave the normal "I allocated this block"
case a longer basic block to work with before it has to do its first
branch (via breaking apart an embedded assignment in an "if", and
hoisting common code out of both branches).