Thanks for all of the help.  Using range_item certainly simplified my 
job.  Although I more than made up for it with all of the decref and 
error checking calls.

One side effect of using range_item is that str(range(...)) is now 
subject to the same errors as indexing into really big range:
for example: 
x = range(1000000000000000000)
x[1]
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
OverflowError: Python int too large to convert to C ssize_t

In a world where ints and long ints have been unified the existence of 
this error seems like a bug.

I think the right thing would be to fix range_item and range_length so 
they do not use Py_ssize_t for the length of the range.  But I may be in 
over my head on that guess.

I also discovered that range_item does not work with negative indices.

I have been poking around the tests and added some simple tests to the 
test_range.py class as well.  I assume I should submit a patch for that 
as well?

I have attached a new patch for rangeobject.c

Brad