I am overwhelmed by this thread (and a few other things in real life) but here are some thoughts.
1. It seems the PEP doesn't sufficiently show that there is a problem to be solved. There are claims of inefficiency but these aren't substantiated and I kind of doubt that e.g. representing line numbers in 32 bits rather than 20 bits is a problem. 2. I have handled complaints in the past about existing (accidental) limits that caused problems for generated code. People occasionally generate *really* wacky code (IIRC the most recent case was a team that was generating Python code from machine learning models they had developed using other software) and as long as it works I don't want to limit such applications. 3. Is it easy to work around a limit? Even if it is, it may be a huge pain. I've heard of a limit of 65,000 methods in Java on Android, and my understanding was that it was actually a huge pain for both the toolchain maintainers and app developers (IIRC the toolchain had special tricks to work around it, but those required app developers to change their workflow). Yes, 65,000 is a lot smaller than a million, but in a different context the same concern applies. 4. What does Python currently do if you approach or exceed one of these limits? I tried a simple experiment, eval(str(list(range(2000000)))), and this completes in a few seconds, even though the source code is a single 16 Mbyte-long line. 5. On the other hand, the current parser cannot handle more than 100 nested parentheses, and I've not heard complaints about this. I suspect the number of nested indent levels is similarly constrained by the parser. The default function call recursion limit is set to 1000 and bumping it significantly risks segfaults. So clearly some limits exist and are apparently acceptable. 6. In Linux and other UNIX-y systems, there are many per-process or per-user limits, and they can be tuned -- the user (using sudo) can change many of those limits, the sysadmin can change the defaults within some range, and sometimes the kernel can be recompiled with different absolute limits (not an option for most users or even sysadmins). These limits are also quite varied -- the maximum number of open file descriptors is different than the maximum pipe buffer size. This is of course as it should be -- the limits exist to protect the OS and other users/processes from runaway code and intentional attacks on resources. (And yet, fork bombs exist, and it's easy to fill up a filesystem...) I take from this that limits are useful, may have to be overridable, and should have values that make sense given the resource they guard. -- --Guido van Rossum (python.org/~guido) *Pronouns: he/him **(why is my pronoun here?)* <http://feministing.com/2015/02/03/how-using-they-as-a-singular-pronoun-can-change-the-world/>
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