Dumb python questions

[Paul Rubin]

"Alex Martelli" <aleaxit at yahoo.com> writes:
> GMP is pretty fast, and so is its wrapper GMPY.  See
> gmpy.sf.net.  I don't think it's a "weird kludge" to wrap
> a good multiprecision library to get at its functionality
> from Python -- I think it's rather Pythonic, actually.

Yes, using gmpy works pretty well if it's available.  But it's not a
standard Python module.  It's kind of a strange idea though, that
Python has built-in long ints but I have to use an add-on package if I
want to do simple operations like find out how large a number is.

I guess I'll probably use gmpy in my application if I can, because
it's quite a bit faster than Python's built-in arithmetic, though
Python's is quite respectable and useable (as compared to, say, perl's
Math::BigInt package.  

Thanks.