[Python-3000] int-long unification (original) (raw)

"Martin v. Löwis" martin at v.loewis.de
Sun Aug 20 18:30:23 CEST 2006

Guido van Rossum schrieb:

Are you interested in doing this at the Google sprint next week?

Sure; I hadn't any special plans so far.

What do you think?

Sounds good. There are two problems I see:

how to benchmark?
there are subtle details in the API that require changes to extension code. In particular, PyInt_AsLong currently cannot fail, but can fail with a range error after the unification.

However, to evaluate the performance, it is possible to work around that.

For this specific problem, I would propose to introduce another API, say

int PyLong_ToLong(PyObject* val, long* result);

which will return true(1) for success, and set an exception in case of a failure. Then, we get

long PyLong_AsLong(PyObj *val) { long result; if(!PyLong_ToLong(val, &result))return -1; return result; }

and perhaps

long PyInt_AsLong(PyObj* val) { long result; if(!PyLong_ToLong(val, &result)) Py_FatalError("old-style integer conversion failed"); return result; }

Regards, Martin