Upper limit?!

[David Oppenheimer]

I was playing around with the command line and discovered that when I
enter 2 to the 30th power, I get a number back...when I enter 2 to the
31st power I get an overflow error.  Is 2 to the 30th power near the
upper limit for computations?!
See below:

>>> 2**30
1073741824
>>> 2**31
Traceback (innermost last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in ?
OverflowError: integer pow()

David O.

"Walk this way please....."