suse 9.1 and 64

["Martin v. Löwis"]

Terry Reedy wrote:
> I believe the main difference from the Python viewpoint is 64 instead of 32
> bit ints and everything that follows from that.  For instance, type(2**60),
> is int instead of long.  Maybe someone else knows more.

In addition, Python, in 64-bit mode, will use 64-bit addresses. That
means it can address more that 4GB of main memory. Actually, the 
limitation on 32-bit systems is often 2GB, which 64-bit Python helps
to overcome.

Unfortunately, Python still won't support sequence indexes above 2**31,
so you still can't have lists with more than 2**31 items (but such a
list would consume 8GB of main memory for the pointers to the list items
alone, plus memory for the actual objects). More unfortunate is that
it won't deal with strings larger than 2GB, either.

Regards,
Martin