Type discrepancy using struct.unpack

[Pieter Rautenbach]

Hallo,

I have a 64 bit server with CentOS 4.3 installed, running Python.

[pymsnt at lutetium pymsnt-0.11.2]$ uname -a
Linux lutetium.mxit.co.za 2.6.9-34.ELsmp #1 SMP Thu Mar 9 06:23:23 GMT
2006 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

Consider the following two snippets, issuing a struct.unpack(...) using
Python 2.3.4 and Python 2.5 respectively.

[pymsnt at lutetium pymsnt-0.11.2]$ python
Python 2.5 (r25:51908, Oct 17 2006, 10:34:59)
[GCC 3.4.5 20051201 (Red Hat 3.4.5-2)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import struct
>>> print type(struct.unpack(">L", "xxxx")[0])
<type 'int'>
>>>

[pymsnt at lutetium pymsnt-0.11.2]$ /usr/bin/python2.3
Python 2.3.4 (#1, Feb 17 2005, 21:01:10)
[GCC 3.4.3 20041212 (Red Hat 3.4.3-9.EL4)] on linux2
Type "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.
>>> import struct
>>> print type(struct.unpack(">L", "xxxx")[0])
<type 'long'>
>>>

I would expect <type 'long'> in both cases. Why is this not so?

Regards
Pieter Rautenbach