SF patch 637176: list.sort crasher

SF patch 637176: list.sort crasher

Armin Rigo's Draconian but effective fix for

SF bug 453523: list.sort crasher

slightly fiddled to catch more cases of list mutation.  The dreaded
internal "immutable list type" is gone!  OTOH, if you look at a list
*while* it's being sorted now, it will appear to be empty.  Better
than a core dump.