[Python-Dev] Unifying Long Integers and Integers: baseint

[Guido van Rossum]

> I would like to urge caution before making this change. Despite
> what the PEP may say, I actually think that creating a 'baseint'
> type is the WRONG design choice for the long term. I envision
> an eventual Python which has just one type, called 'int'. The
> fact that an efficient implementation is used when the ints
> are small and an arbitrary-precision version when they get too
> big would be hidden from the user by automatic promotion of
> overflow. (By "hidden" I mean the user doesn't need to care, not
> that they can't find out if they want to.) We are almost there
> already, but if people start coding to 'baseinteger' it takes
> us down a different path entirely. 'basestring' is a completely
> different issue -- there will always be a need for both unicode
> and 8-bit-strings as separate types.

Not so sure.  I expect that, like Jython and IronPython, Python 3000
will use unicode for strings, and have a separate mutable byte array
for 8-bit bytes.

In Python 3000 I expect that indeed somehow the existence of long is
completely hidden from the user, but that's a long time away, and
until then baseinteger might be a better solution than requiring
people to write isinstance(x, (int, long)).

--Guido van Rossum (home page: http://www.python.org/~guido/)