Alexander Belopolsky <[email protected]> added the comment:
On Tue, May 11, 2010 at 7:42 PM, Daniel Stutzbach <[email protected]> wrote: .. > Isn't that adding an extra check in every case to speed up a > you-can't-seriously-expect-that-to-work corner case? > The check is cheap - just a machine integer comparison, so I would not even take that cost into account. In my view math.factorial() is primarily of interest in educational settings where it is quite likely that someone would be curious enough to pass sys.maxsize to it. The main value in setting a theoretically justified limit is that overflow exception can carry a meaningful message, e.g. "factorial result would have too many digits", rather than an unhelpful "Python int too large to convert to C long". ---------- _______________________________________ Python tracker <[email protected]> <http://bugs.python.org/issue8692> _______________________________________ _______________________________________________ Python-bugs-list mailing list Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-bugs-list/archive%40mail-archive.com
