Mark Dickinson <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> added the comment:
> What are the use cases for ranges with length greater than maxsize?
Yeah---I'm a bit short on use cases. The one that originally bit me with
Python 2.x was when I was doing a search for a quadratic non-residue
modulo a largeish prime;
for i in range(1, p):
if (i_is_a_nonresidue_modulo_p):
break
Here p might be a 200-digit prime number, and the situation is that half
the integers between 1 and p-1 are 'quadratic residues', while the other
half are 'quadratic nonresidues'; in practice the residues and
nonresidues are mixed up fairly well, so the first nonresidue shows up
pretty quickly, but there's no known small upper bound on when the first
nonresidue appears.
Of course, it's not hard to rewrite this with a while loop instead; it
would just be a bit annoying if that were necessary, when the code above
is so clear and direct, and the one obvious way to do it (TM).
I'd also note that it's not completely out of the question that something
like range(10**10) would be useful on a 32-bit machine: a long-running
process might easily go through 10**10 iterations of something.
I agree it's a bit strange to have a semi-functional range object, that
you can iterate over but not take the length of.
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Tracker <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
<http://bugs.python.org/issue2690>
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