Optimization of str.format() for cases with unicode, long, and float
arguments. This gives about 30% speed improvement for the simplest
(but most common) cases. This patch skips the __format__ dispatch, and
also avoids creating an object to hold the format_spec.
Unfortunately, backporting this to 2.6 is going to be more challenging
due to str/unicode issues with format_spec. I'll work on that next.
Then I'll spend some time profiling and see what that tells me.