Cleanup yielding a small speed boost: before rich comparisons were
introduced, list.sort() was rewritten to use only the "< or not <?"
distinction. After rich comparisons were introduced, docompare() was
fiddled to translate a Py_LT Boolean result into the old "-1 for <,
0 for ==, 1 for >" flavor of outcome, and the sorting code was left
alone. This left things more obscure than they should be, and turns
out it also cost measurable cycles.
So: The old CMPERROR novelty is gone. docompare() is renamed to islt(),
and now has the same return conditinos as PyObject_RichCompareBool. The
SETK macro is renamed to ISLT, and is even weirder than before (don't
complain unless you want to maintain the sort code <wink>).
Overall, this yields a 1-2% speedup in the usual (no explicit function
passed to list.sort()) case when sorting arrays of floats (as sortperf.py
does). The boost is higher for arrays of ints.