Hi Alexander,

I took the liberty of messing with your patch slightly;  I didn't want to ask you to make further changes since the patch was fine, and my messing was mostly just to satisfy my own fussiness (only the first two items were really necessary):

Minor updates:
 - add Misc/NEWS entry
 - remove trailing whitespace and fix spaces that should have been a tab
 - added some extra tests to check all possible combinations of bad
   arguments, purely to check for refcounting problems
 - initialize low to NULL, to match the Py_XDECREF(low) (could change
   that Py_XDECREF to Py_DECREF instead, but the code's more resistant
   to random refactorings this way --- see next item :)
 - randomly refactor:  regroup blocks for ease of reading
 - don't do PyLong_FromLong(1) until it's needed ('zero' is different,
   since it's always used in the non-error case)
 - [micro-optimization]: don't pass a known zero value to
   get_range_long_argument

Any objections or comments?  Can I apply this version of the patch?