Dumb python questions

[Jason Harper]

Tim Peters wrote:
> About twice every three years, somebody gets excited about this, and says
> they're going to "do something" about it; and Guido approved of the idea of
> adding some methods to longs years ago.  In reality, nothing happens,
> apparently because the kind of person who gets excited about this can't
> restrain themself from getting excited about all sorts of other enhancements
> too, and that's fatal for all the usual reasons.

I think I was the most recent of the excited people you're referring to.
 I did, in fact, manage to implement my set of longint methods: where I
bogged down was in trying to do the same for JPython.  Unfortunately,
the underlying Java BigInteger class doesn't expose some of the details
I needed to implement the methods efficiently, and they ended up having
the same order of complexity as what you could already write directly in
Python.  I didn't feel that it would be reasonable to submit such a
fundamental change to the core language, when it would not actually help
in all Python variants.  Perhaps I should have looked into a different
or smaller set of methods that could have been efficiently implemented
in Java, but some computer and real-world problems I was having around
that time made it impractical for me to work on it further.

I tried to report my results here several times, but my newsreader
seemed to have other ideas, and would inevitably crash or hang when I
tried to post such a message.  Hopefully this time will work better...
	Jason Harper