Merged revisions 72577 via svnmerge from

svn+ssh://pythondev@svn.python.org/python/trunk

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  r72577 | tarek.ziade | 2009-05-12 09:01:29 +0200 (Tue, 12 May 2009) | 1 line

  removing the assert statement so the code works when Python is run with -O
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