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Yup, lookin' better.  Python does assume 8-bit bytes in 
several places, and also 2's-complement integers.  Since 
size_t is guaranteed (by C) to be an unsigned type, the 
largest value of type size_t is more easily expressed as

(~(size_t)0)

The C part of the patch looks fine then.  The test is a 
little dubious:  who says the machine can't create a 
billion-integer list?  The idea that 1e9 necessarily 
overflows in this context is a 32-bit address-space 
assumption.  But I'm willing to delay fixing that until a 
machine with a usable larger address space appears <wink>.

So marked Accepted and assigned to you for checkin.  Thanks!