[Python-Dev] Discussion Draft: PyDev Summary for week ending 20-Oct-2002

[Tim Peters]

[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>.