hex to signed integer

[Steven Taschuk]

Quoth Bengt Richter:
  [...]
>  >>> -2**31
>  -2147483648L
> Oops, is that a wart/buglet BTW?

That it's a long and not an int?  Certainly not a bug, arguably a
wart, and in any case it's 2's-complement's fault, not Python's:
-2**31 is equivalent to -(2**31), and the inner expression doesn't
fit into an int (on suitable machines).

I suppose long arithmetic could produce ints when possible, but it
seems unlikely to be worth the trouble.

-- 
Steven Taschuk             "The world will end if you get this wrong."
staschuk at telusplanet.net     -- "Typesetting Mathematics -- User's Guide",
                                 Brian Kernighan and Lorrinda Cherry