can python easily be made truly 64-bit? (was Re: suse 9.1 and 64)

[Mike Coleman]

"Martin v. Löwis" <martin at v.loewis.de> writes:
> I see. Then the current limitation is in no way serious for you. You
> apparently don't have the actual need, with an actual limitation in
> actual data, which forces you to take work-arounds at the present
> day.

That's correct.  I did bump into the limitation while designing a program a
couple of years ago, in the sense that I discovered it and worked around it.
(I don't recall exactly what the workaround was--maybe I switched to C++ for
that program.)

> For the specific example of large strings, you might have to
> introduce a "multi-level" string, where a string wrapper has ten
> strings, each 1GB of size, to achive the illusion of a 10GB string;
> likewise for mmap. Yes, that would be a work-around, but apparently
> none that you already had to make.

This would kind of work.  It doesn't seem like you could pass such a string as
an argument to re.match or re.sub or as an operand to 'in', though, and expect
things to work correctly.

Anyway, I was just curious about the status of this.  Thanks!

Mike