On Dec 7, 2007 11:06 AM, Gregory P. Smith <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 12/3/07, Guido van Rossum <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > On Dec 2, 2007 12:56 PM, "Martin v. Löwis" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > It's only used for sys.maxint. Do we still need sys.maxint and > > > > PyInt_GetMax()? IMO PyLong_GetNativeMax() and sys.maxnativelong are > > > > better names. > > > > > > I think they should go entirely. They don't give any interesting > > > information about the Python implementation. > > > > Actually it's still somewhat interesting to be able to tell whether a > > particular Python build uses 64-bit pointer or 32-bit pointers. (I > > realize sys.maxint doesn't quite tell us this, but on Linux at least > > it does.) I also suspecet that sys.maxint is used frequently for "some > > large integer" used as an approximation of infinity in some context. > > It is, but it doesn't appear to common: > > http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=+sys.maxint > > Only turns up ~10 unique non-Python-itself projects using within the first 5 > pages of results. Much of the time it is used as a large number. Anyone > porting that code forward to 2.6 or later can fix that. > > Please don't encourage its misuse for determining if the host has 32 or > 64bit longs or pointers. It does not do that. Use platform.architecture() > for the long size and look at the length of a hex pointer in the repr of a > class for C pointer size.
sys.maxsize should be backported to 2.6. -- --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/) _______________________________________________ Python-3000 mailing list Python-3000@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-3000 Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-3000/archive%40mail-archive.com
