[Python-Dev] Tagged integers

[Guido van Rossum]

> I'd rather not like to see hackery like misused pointers
> in the core, so you can count me as -1 on this.

-1000 here.  In a past life (the ABC implementation) we used this and
it was a horrible experience.  Basically, there were too many places
where you had to make sure you didn't have an integer before
dereferencing a pointer, and finding the omissions one core dump at a
time was a nightmare.

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