The attached patch is to offer the functionality
desired by feature request: python.org/sf/491033

On machines that use standard IEEE floating point
doubles, the 'infinity' needs only to be 1e16 due to
the limited precision of floating point.  1e309 is used
for convenience sake, and will continue to be a
precision infinity until 1024 bits of precision in
floating point values is available.  At such point in
time where 1e309 is available in hardware, it will
still sufficient due to the practical limitations of
counting.

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Sorry about that, I generated the patch by hand and got the
ordering messed up.

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This patch lacks changes to the documentation and the test
suite.

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The attached patch includes both a documentation patch, as
well as a modified loop patch to explicitly match the
documentation.

The patches are concatenated and in standard context diff
format (as per the Python patch submission guidelines, sorry
about the previous unified diff).  The test suite does not
seem to contain tests for asyncore.  It does contain a test
for asynchat, which will be unaffected by this patch.

One thing to note: the use of 'count = count - 1' rather
than 'count -= 1' is to remove potential bugs in the case
where a mutable number-like object with a modifying __isub__
method were to be passed by a user.

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Thanks for the patch. Applied as

libasyncore.tex 1.15
asyncore.py 1.51
NEWS 1.986

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This patch should not have been accepted.

Relying on a floating point infinity to marhsal/unmarshal correctly 
is a bad idea.

With the aid of the LC_NUMERIC agnostism patch, this patch 
breaks test_asynchat *when asyncore.pyc exists*.  I don't have a 
windows machine with a CVS HEAD Python to check, but if 2.3 
behaviour is retained, the upshot is that the count parameter will 
default to *1* if the code is loaded from a .pyc file.

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If it would be preferred, I have an alternate patch against
1.50 from CVS that uses None instead of floating point infinity.

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um, "yes".  what's in CVS currently is not going to be there for 
very long.

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I have backed out the patch in

libasyncore.tex 1.16
asyncore.py 1.52
NEWS 1.1001

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Y

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There is an attached patch that uses None.  I ran the
standard tests twice, and it does not fail when asyncore.pyc
exists (5 tests should suffice).

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This is the patch I was trying to say was much better :-)

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Checked in the new version as 

Lib/asyncore.py revision 1.53
Doc/lib/libasyncore.tex revision 1.17
Misc/NEWS revision 1.1015

Thanks!