int/long unification hides bugs

[Peter Hansen]

Cliff Wells wrote:
> On Tue, 2004-10-26 at 05:10 +0000, Sam Holden wrote:
> 
>>On 25 Oct 2004 21:25:07 -0700, kartik <kartick_vaddadi at yahoo.com> wrote:
>>
>>>integers are used in different ways from strings. i may expect file
>>>paths to be around 100 characters, and if i get a 500-character path,
>>>i have no problem just because of the length. but if a person's age is
>>>500 where i expect it to be less than 100, then **definitely**
>>>something's wrong.
>>
>>What if Noah is using your program?
> 
> Then Python clearly needs a special mode so that when a person's age is
> entered large numbers are allowed, but when counting animals it throws
> an exception if the number is greater than two.
> 
> Duh.

And what about Methuselah?  He's not going to be receiving his
social security cheques if he can't enter his age as higher than,
say, 2**7 (as our friend kartik would arbitrarily say...).  We
actually need 2**10 for his age, but now that's a little too
high so maybe we'd better just kill the old bugger off at 2**9
(hey, he's lived so long that shaving 208 years off his age
won't bother him, right?).

-Peter