int/long unification hides bugs

[Peter Hansen]

kartik wrote:
> there seems to be a serious problem with allowing numbers to grow in a
> nearly unbounded manner, as int/long unification does: it hides bugs.
[snip]
> PEP 237 says, "It will give new Python programmers [...] one less
> thing to learn [...]". i feel this is not so important as the quality
> of code a programmer writes once he does learn the language.

Do you feel strongly enough about the quality of your code to write
automated tests for it?  Or are you just hoping that one tiny class
of potential bugs will be caught for you by this feature of the
language?

I'm not sure what you're asking, because even the exposure of
latent bugs which you are describing can happen only when you
*run* the code.  Are you planning to have your users report
that there are bugs when the program crashes in a code path
which you didn't get around to testing manually?

-Peter