"James Y Knight"
[snip] I propose that id() always return a positive value ... Comments?
1. CPython intentionally searches builtins afters globals and pre-imports the former as __builtins__ just so one can wrap a builtin to modify its apparent behavior for personal needs.
def id(o, max = 2**32): ... i = __builtins__.id(o) ... return (i < 0) and (max - i) or i ... id(a) 9158224 # only semi-tested because I don't have negatives to test and can't force
2. Given that, why bother changing the language for what must be an esoteric need (to formattedly print and view ids)? The id of an object is constant and unique with respect to contemporaneous objects but, for CPython, definitely not with respect to objects with non-overlapping lifetimes. (Newbies often get tripped by the last fact.).
From the viewpoint of Python, ids have no meaning and are only useful for identity comparision. For this purpose, arbitrary strings would have worked as well as integers.
For convenience, CPython uses the apparent address stored as an int. But this is strictly an implementation detail. On modern systems, that 'address' is, I believe, a process-specific virtual address which the hardware memory management system maps the hidden real address -- which is the only reason why systems with less than 2**31 memory can have addresses at or above 2**31 to become negative ints. Terry J. Reedy