This includes:
* Better ways of checking empty lists
* Not shadowing builtin functions like filter
* Preventing invalid slash warnings by marking strings as regexps
* Removing unnecessary brackets
* Lowercase variable names
* Adding/updating parameters in docstrings
* Removing unused code (lines not chunks)
* Change in not a member tests
* Changing some methods to static
* Shorting range membership checks
* Missing parameters
* Make some exception handlers more specific
* Don't define a lambda to a variable
* A few more instance checks to help type checkers
Relented on the strict import of direct objects/classes for the typing
module only. Typing module components can be directly imported because
it makes the code really painful to read and write otherwise.
This is still in-line with the python style guide adopted from Google at
http://google.github.io/styleguide/pyguide.html section 2.2.
Mike Auty