[Raymond Hettinger]

I'm filling in while Brett is on vacation. To make everyone appreciate his formatting and lucidity, I'll skip the reStructuredText and write in my own terse style.

It has its virtues! For example, I actually read this to the end <wink>.

... Python has more than one place that is vulnerable to 32 bit word overflows unless a bunch of tests are put in place to catch unusual highly contrived cases that never come up in real world examples. Since the fixes would be ugly, wordy, and slow, it was decided to leave them alone.

That's just what I would do (i.e., leave them alone). Security Weenies will eat me for lunch because of it, and I don't think anyone else wants to join me at the center of the buffet. That is, this boondoggle had an Air of Inevitability to it. Curious: We're missing a section about your new implementation of the Mersenne Twister <wink>. Speaking of which, I haven't been able to get a copy, but Marsaglia (a Big Name in the field) has another new generator called "The Monster", supposedly described in a preprint, that's simpler than the Twister and has a much longer period (on the order of 10**8000; in contrast, Python's current generator has period ~10**12). By "simpler", I mean that if you read the paper by the Twister's authors, you walked away from it knowing less than when you started <0.6 wink>.

[Raymond Hettinger]

I'm filling in while Brett is on vacation. To make everyone appreciate his formatting and lucidity, I'll skip the reStructuredText and write in my own terse style.

It has its virtues! For example, I actually read this to the end <wink>.

... Python has more than one place that is vulnerable to 32 bit word overflows unless a bunch of tests are put in place to catch unusual highly contrived cases that never come up in real world examples. Since the fixes would be ugly, wordy, and slow, it was decided to leave them alone.

That's just what I would do (i.e., leave them alone). Security Weenies will eat me for lunch because of it, and I don't think anyone else wants to join me at the center of the buffet. That is, this boondoggle had an Air of Inevitability to it. Curious: We're missing a section about your new implementation of the Mersenne Twister <wink>. Speaking of which, I haven't been able to get a copy, but Marsaglia (a Big Name in the field) has another new generator called "The Monster", supposedly described in a preprint, that's simpler than the Twister and has a much longer period (on the order of 10**8000; in contrast, Python's current generator has period ~10**12). By "simpler", I mean that if you read the paper by the Twister's authors, you walked away from it knowing less than when you started <0.6 wink>.