Well, Larry, I certainly am in no mood to start wrangling on python-dev.  A 25 year old C standard is likely to be very mature and reliable by now.  Why take risks? :)

#Py_LOCAL_INLINE exists and demonstrates that we can make use of them when possible.
We could create a #Py_INLINE macro that would work the same, only not necessarily yield inline on some of the older compilers.

It would really be healthy for the pyton code base, for quality, for semantics, and for the learning curve, if we could start to rely less on macros in the core.

Ah well, perhaps I'll throw this out there...