Merge topic branch into blead

Merge topic branch into blead

This branch continues to make more systematic the handy.h definitions of
isFOO() macros started in 53335a31ed2284e8aaf1b6bf1cdcc0c0357841d0,
fixing some bugs and some incidentals found along the way.

Four of these macros are changed to not use function calls for
characters outside the Latin1 range.  Three of these used interpreter
level variables.  All core uses of these three interpreter variables
are removed in this series of commits, so the variables could be removed
without affecting the core.