[Python-3000] long/int unification

[Fredrik Lundh]

Josiah Carlson wrote:

> In the integer case, it reminds me of James Knight's tagged integer
> patch to 2.3 [1].  If using long exclusively is 50% slower, why not try
> the improved speed approach?

looks like GvR was -1000 on this idea at the time, though...

> Also, depending on the objects, one may consider a few other tagged
> objects, like perhaps None, True, and False (they could all be special
> values with a single tag), or even just use 31/63 bits for the tagged
> integer value, with a 1 in the lowest bit signifying it as a tagged integer.

iirc, my pytte1 experiment used tagged objects for integers and single-
character strings, which resulting in considerable speedups for the (small
set of) benchmarks I used.

(on the other hand, the dominating speedups in pytte1 were "true" GC,
and call-site caching combined with streamlined method lookup.  if we
really want to speed things up, we should probably start with call-site
caching and (explicit?) method inlining).

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