Vladimir Marangozov's long-awaited malloc restructuring. For more comments, read the patches@python.org archives. For documentation read the comments in mymalloc.h and objimpl.h. (This is not exactly what Vladimir posted to the patches list; I've made a few changes, and Vladimir sent me a fix in private email for a problem that only occurs in debug mode. I'm also holding back on his change to main.c, which seems unnecessary to me.)

--- a/Python/bltinmodule.c	Wed May 03 22:34:12 2000 +0000
+++ b/Python/bltinmodule.c	Wed May 03 23:44:39 2000 +0000
@@ -1875,7 +1875,7 @@
 		else { /* strip trailing '\n' */
 			result = PyString_FromStringAndSize(s, strlen(s)-1);
 		}
-		free(s);
+		PyMem_FREE(s);
 		return result;
 	}
 	if (v != NULL) {