Is len() restricted to (positive) 32-bit values?

[Josh Taylor]

I have a class that wraps a large file and tries to make it look like a
string w.r.t. slicing.  Here, "large file" means on the order of
hundreds of GB.  All the slicing/indexing stuff through __getitem__()
works fine, but len() is quite broken.  It seems to be converting the
value returned by __len__() to a 32-bit integer.  If the conversion
yields a negative number, it raises an exception.

I'm running Python 2.4.1 on an Opteron running RedHat FC3.  It's a
64-bit processor, and Python ints appear to be 64-bit as well, so even
if len() only works with ints, it should still be able to handle 64-bit
values.

Here's a simple example that shows what I'm talking about:

>>> import sys
>>> sys.version
'2.4.1 (#1, Jun 22 2005, 16:00:46) \n[GCC 3.4.2 20041017 (Red Hat
3.4.2-6.fc3)]'
>>> type(1<<50)
<type 'int'>
>>> type(1<<70)
<type 'long'>
>>> class LenTest:
...     def __len__(self):
...         return 49000000000
...
>>> x = LenTest()
>>> x.__len__()
49000000000
>>> len(x)
1755359744

Is this a bug, a design decision, or do I have something misconfigured
in my Python build?

-Josh