Guido van Rossum wrote:
The email below is a serious bug report. A quick analysis shows that UserString.count() calls the count() method on a string object, which calls PyArg_ParseTuple() with the format string "O|ii". The 'i' format code truncates integers. It probably should raise an overflow exception instead. But that would still cause the test to fail -- just in a different way (more explicit). Then the string methods should be fixed to use long ints instead -- and then something else would probably break...
All uses in stringobject.c and unicodeobject.c use INT_MAX together with integers, so there's no problem on that side of the fence ;-)
Since strings and Unicode objects use integers to describe the length of the object (as well as most if not all other builtin sequence types), the correct default value should thus be something like sys.maxlen which then gets set to INT_MAX.
I'd suggest adding sys.maxlen and the modifying UserString.py, re.py and sre_parse.py accordingly.
Hm, I'm not so sure. It would be much better if passing sys.maxint would just WORK... Since that's what people have been doing so far. --Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)