the generated bytecode for list comprehensions and speeds them up
by about a third. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)
+\item The peephole bytecode optimizer has been improved to
+produce shorter, faster bytecode; remarkably the resulting bytecode is
+more readable. (Enhanced by Raymond Hettinger.)
+
\item String concatenations in statements of the form \code{s = s +
"abc"} and \code{s += "abc"} are now performed more efficiently in
certain circumstances. This optimization won't be present in other
find the N largest or smallest values in a dataset without the
expense of a full sort. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)
+\item The \module{httplib} module now contains constants for HTTP
+status codes defined in various HTTP-related RFC documents. Constants
+have names such as \constant{OK}, \constant{CREATED},
+\constant{CONTINUE}, and \constant{MOVED_PERMANENTLY}; use pydoc to
+get a full list. (Contributed by Andrew Eland.)
+
\item The \module{imaplib} module now supports IMAP's THREAD command
(contributed by Yves Dionne) and new \method{deleteacl()} and
\method{myrights()} methods (contributed by Arnaud Mazin).
classes derive from a new \class{BaseRotatingHandler} class that can
be used to implement other rotating handlers.
+\item The \module{marshal} module now shares interned strings on unpacking a
+data structure. This may shrink the size of certain pickle strings,
+but the primary effect is to make \file{.pyc} files significantly smaller.
+(Contributed by Martin von Loewis.)
+
\item The \module{nntplib} module's \class{NNTP} class gained
\method{description()} and \method{descriptions()} methods to retrieve
newsgroup descriptions for a single group or for a range of groups.
implements fast dictionary lookups without masking exceptions raised
during the look-up process. (Contributed by Raymond Hettinger.)
+ \item The \csimplemacro{Py_IS_NAN(\var{X})} macro returns 1 if
+ its float or double argument \var{X} is a NaN.
+ (Contributed by Tim Peters.)
+
\item A new function, \cfunction{PyArg_VaParseTupleAndKeywords()},
is the same as \cfunction{PyArg_ParseTupleAndKeywords()} but takes a
\ctype{va_list} instead of a number of arguments.