Imposing a hard limit on Python integers

[jeff5 (Jeff Allen)]

@gpshead

Why bother exposing the “limit” anywhere? Nobody can use int values even approaching that large anyways. The limit is effectively already in place, it’s just that you currently potentially wind up getting a MemoryError or other not quite as explanatory exception.

That makes it a language feature, and the value is chosen to make likely approaches to implementation feasible, including CPython’s.

I agree that if it is part of the language specification it does not need to be in sys.int_info. Then all conforming implementations need to implement it, without exception (other than the out-of-memory kind). 64-bit CPython builds are already there, but it raises the bar for builds that can only do 31-bit indexing internally.