Why long integers

[Joe Green]

I have been wondering why we have Long integers as a seperate type:

import sys
a=sys.maxint+1 # gives 2147483648L <- coerced to Long
a=2147483648 # gives 2147483648L <- coerced to Long

so the first question is: what is the point of the L in a=2147483648L ?
and:

a-=a #gives 0L

what is the advantage (or point of) it remaining Long ?

What I am tryinfg to say is, why is there not just an Integer type, which is
normally 2 bytes, but expands AND contracts as necessary ?
(Part of the explanation will be historical, but ignoring that)

[Gerrit Holl]

Tim Peters wrote:

[Joe Green]

I have been wondering why we have Long integers as a seperate type:
...

Please see

http://www.python.org/peps/pep-0237.html

Why is it PEP 237 is not implemented using __future__?
There are several incompatible changes: x<<n, 0xffffffff, etc.
I am not a computer scientist so I do not understand why this
behaved like it did in the past (nor do I really care), but being
able to user a from __future__ import foo statement seems applicable
here. Why hasn't it been applied here?

regards,
Gerrit Holl.

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