SF #660455 : patch by NNorwitz.
"Unsigned" (i.e., positive-looking, but really negative) hex/oct
constants with a leading minus sign are once again properly negated.
The micro-optimization for negated numeric constants did the wrong
thing for such hex/oct constants. The patch avoids the optimization
for all hex/oct constants.
This needs to be backported to Python 2.2!
diff --git a/Misc/NEWS b/Misc/NEWS
index 11521c6..8a6e902 100644
--- a/Misc/NEWS
+++ b/Misc/NEWS
@@ -12,6 +12,18 @@
Core and builtins
-----------------
+- Through a bytecode optimizer bug (and I bet you didn't even know
+ Python *had* a bytecode optimizer :-), "unsigned" hex/oct constants
+ with a leading minus sign would come out with the wrong sign.
+ ("Unsigned" hex/oct constants are those with a face value in the
+ range sys.maxint+1 through sys.maxint*2+1, inclusive; these have
+ always been interpreted as negative numbers through sign folding.)
+ E.g. 0xffffffff is -1, and -(0xffffffff) is 1, but -0xffffffff would
+ come out as -4294967295. This was the case in Python 2.2 through
+ 2.2.2 and 2.3a1, and in Python 2.4 it will once again have that
+ value, but according to PEP 237 it really needs to be 1 now. This
+ will be backported to Python 2.2.3 a well. (SF #660455)
+
- super(X, x): x may now be a proxy for an X instance, i.e.
issubclass(x.__class__, X) but not issubclass(type(x), X).