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

[Gareth McCaughan]

On Wednesday 2004-08-11 22:02, Michael Chermside wrote:

> 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.

This is why "integer" is a better name than "baseinteger".
For now it can be the common supertype of int and long.
In the future, it can be the name of the single integer
type.

-- 
g