for loop: range() result has too many items

[David C. Ullrich]

On Wed, 14 Oct 2009 01:54:44 -0700 (PDT), Mark Dickinson
<dickinsm at gmail.com> wrote:

>On Oct 13, 10:39 pm, Steven D'Aprano
><ste... at REMOVE.THIS.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>> On Tue, 13 Oct 2009 16:17:58 -0500, Peng Yu wrote:
>> > Hi,
>>
>> > The following code does not run because range() does not accept a big
>> > number.
>>
>> Incorrect.
>>
>> >>> range(sys.maxint+2, sys.maxint+5)
>>
>> [2147483649L, 2147483650L, 2147483651L]
>
>For what it's worth, there *is* a Python oddity lurking
>under the surface here, at least for 64-bit.  Here's
>Python 2.6 on a 64-bit machine:

Is that a 64-bit Python as well?

>>>> range(2**31-1)
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>MemoryError
>>>> range(2**31)
>Traceback (most recent call last):
>  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
>OverflowError: range() result has too many items
>
>The first call tries to allocate a list containing
>2**31-1 integers.  At 32 bytes per entry (8 for the
>list pointer, 24 for the integer itself), that's not
>surprising on a machine with < 64 Gb of memory.
>
>The second call, however, doesn't even try to
>allocate the memory, but decides that the range can't
>be represented.  That's not right:  this is an LP64
>machine, so the size of the list can be represented,
>and the start, stop and step values are representable
>as C longs (which is what CPython uses internally for
>this purpose).  On a machine with >64 Gb of memory,
>this call should succeed.  On an LP64 machine with
><64 Gb of memory, it should produce MemoryError, not
>OverflowError.
>
>Mark