Raymond,

There must be a reason why we constantly disagree.  Do you live in
California by any chance? :-)

I am not sure if map(None, ..) fate is still up for voting given your
changes at r60206, but your own patch illustrates the problem that I
highlighted:

< it = izip(map(key, in1), count(), in2)                  # decorate
--
> keys = in1 if key is None else map(key, in1)
> it = izip(keys, count(), in2)                           # decorate

See
http://svn.python.org/view/python/branches/py3k/Lib/heapq.py?rev=60206&view=diff&r1=60206&r2=60205&p1=python/branches/py3k/Lib/heapq.py&p2=/python/branches/py3k/Lib/heapq.py

With filter, availability of bool as a substitute for None is probably
making special handling unnecessary because __nonzero__ is called on
every object anyways.

In the case of map(None,...) the optimization is more substantial and
without None is precluded by the absence of a singleton identity function.