int/long unification hides bugs

[kartik]

"Terry Reedy" <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote in message news:<mailman.5480.1098763791.5135.python-list at python.org>...
> "kartik" <kartick_vaddadi at yahoo.com> wrote in message 
> news:940ee3e8.0410251927.38347d92 at posting.google.com...
> > 1)catching overflow bugs in the language itself frees u from writing
> > overflow tests.
> 
> It is a fundamental characteristic of counts and integers that adding 1 is 
> always valid.  Given that, raising an overflow exception is itself a bug, 
> one that Python had and has now eliminated.
> 
> If one wishes to work with residue classes mod n, +1 is also still always 
> valid.  It is just that (n-1) + 1 is 0 instead of n.  So again, raising an 
> overflow error is a bug.

i don't care what mathematical properties are satisfied; what matters
is to what extent the type system helps me in writing bug-free code

> [...]However, the limit n could be 
> anything, so fixing it at, say, 2**31 - 1 is almost always useless.

i dont think so. if it catches bugs that cause numbers to increase
beyond 2**31, that's valuable.
> The use of fixed range ints is a space-time machine performance hack that 
> has been costly in human thought time.

on what basis do u say that

-kartik