Wow! I've just been checking out the What's New in Python 2.4, and I can see any number of things that're going to make my life easier, and my code faster.
PEP289: Generator Expressions is going to make my take(4, even(xrange(sys.maxint))) dreams possible.
New sort() options can get rid of some DSU usages and sorted() will return a sorted list without changing the original sequence.
itertools.groupby() will help a lot of simplifying grouping in sisynala and other code. itertools.tee() looks like it'd be useful for multi-line text processing by making lookahead easy.
Finally, one can get rid of many inefficient and inelegant lambda uses with the new operator.attrgetter() and operator.itemgetter() as a way to get attributes from objects or items from sequences for use in map() or sort(). Another thing I've often had to resort to with sisynala.
I'm certainly looking forward to this functionality, and it drives home the point to me that Python is driven by programmers who want to make (usually their) life easy, and keep programming something fun by making tasks elegantly solvable. Just another two months...