Anthony Baxter wrote:
Python's worked on the Alphas for approximately ever, and works on Itanium, so I can't imagine you'll find any 32-bit-isms left in the code.
Actually, there are plenty of them, however it is unlikely that anybody will encounter them for a few more years. The biggest problem is that the number of elements in a sequence (string, list, tuple) is represented as "int", whereas it should be a signed variant of size_t. I have a patch that corrects many of these issues, but I plan to publish that only after 2.4. The problem becomes only apparent if you have more than 2G items. For a string, this might be a significant limitation. For a list, it requires 16GiB of memory to represent the list alone, not accounting for any items in the list, so very few people have sufficient hardware to even run a test case that demonstrates the problem. As for Alphas: their Windows port was a 32-bit port; Microsoft did not have Win64 at that time. Regards, Martin