How to get decimal form of largest known prime?

[Irmen de Jong]

Tim Peters wrote:
> [Irmen de Jong]
> 
>>In fact, what algorithm is Python itself using when you try to:
>>
>> >>> print 2**24036583 - 1
>>
>>??
> 
> 
> Recent Pythons convert to base 10000 internally by repeated division, along
> the lines of
[... interesting comments....]

To me it sounds as if Python's default long-to-decimal-string code
is heavily optimized already. So then why this discussion about a
fast algorithm to print very large longs? How could it be better than
just a simple:

 >>> print myHugeLong

--Irmen