Number of bits/sizeof int

[John Machin]

On Jan 31, 6:03 pm, Jon Clements <jon... at googlemail.com> wrote:
> Hi Group,
>
> This has a certain amount of irony (as this is what I'm pretty much
> after):-
> Fromhttp://docs.python.org/dev/3.0/whatsnew/3.1.html:
> "The int() type gained a bit_length method that returns the number of
> bits necessary to represent its argument in binary:"
>
> Any tips on how to get this in 2.5.2 as that's the production version
> I'm stuck with.

For a positive integer, the simplest method (not necessarily the
fastest) is to count how many times you need to shift it right to make
it become zero.
For non-positive integers, what answers do you want?