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Here's a first try at a patch that converts the Decimal coefficient
from type str to type bytes. It needs some work: here are some timings 
for a complete run of the test suite (best of 3 in each case) on my
MacBook.
Python 3.0, str: 12.880s
Python 3.0, bytes: 13.294s
Python 2.6: 9.279s
Python 2.5: 9.212s
There's still some room for speedup with the bytes patch, but at the 
moment it doesn't look as though performance alone is a compelling reason 
to make this change.