On Sun, Sep 30, 2018 at 11:04 AM Chris Angelico <ros...@gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 1, 2018 at 12:58 AM David Mertz <me...@gnosis.cx> wrote:
> >> I'm not sure what's going on. I have a Py3 busily calculating
> >> 2**(2**65) and it's pegging a CPU core while progressively consuming
> >> memory, but it responds to Ctrl-C, which suggests that Python bytecode
> >> is still being executed.
> > I'm not quite sure, but my guess is that at SOME POINT you'll get an
> overflow exception when the current value gets too big to store as a native
> int. Or maybe it'll be a segfault; I don't know.
> >>> "a" * (2**63 - 1)
> Traceback (most recent call last):
> File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
> MemoryError
>
> Bam, instant. (Interestingly, trying to use 2**63 says "OverflowError:
> cannot fit 'int' into an index-sized integer", suggesting that
> "index-sized integer" is signed, even though a size can and should be
> unsigned.) Were there some kind of hard limit, it would be entirely
> possible to exceed that and get an instant error, without actually
> calculating all the way up there. But it looks like that doesn't
> happen.
>
Sure, it wouldn't be THAT hard to do bounds checking in the Python
implementation to make '2**(2**65))' an instance error rather than a
wait-to-exhaust-swap one. But it's a corner case, and probably not worth
the overhead for all the non-crazy uses of integer arithmetic.
> In any case, the colloquial definition that I usually cite ("Python
> can store infinitely big integers" or "integers can be as big as you
> have RAM to store") is within epsilon of correct :D
>
I teach the same thing. For beginners or intermediate students, I just say
"unbounded ints." Occasionally for advanced students I add the footnote.
--
Keeping medicines from the bloodstreams of the sick; food
from the bellies of the hungry; books from the hands of the
uneducated; technology from the underdeveloped; and putting
advocates of freedom in prisons. Intellectual property is
to the 21st century what the slave trade was to the 16th.
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