Is there a way to get the largest integer one can use in Python?
Question:
Is there some pre-defined constant like INT_MAX?
Answers:
Python has arbitrary precision integers so there is no true fixed maximum. You’re only limited by available memory.
In Python 2, there are two types, int and long. ints use a C type, while longs are arbitrary precision. You can use sys.maxint to find the maximum int. But ints are automatically promoted to long, so you usually don’t need to worry about it:
sys.maxint + 1
works fine and returns a long.
sys.maxint does not even exist in Python 3, since int and long were unified into a single arbitrary precision int type.
Is there some pre-defined constant like INT_MAX?
Python has arbitrary precision integers so there is no true fixed maximum. You’re only limited by available memory.
In Python 2, there are two types, int and long. ints use a C type, while longs are arbitrary precision. You can use sys.maxint to find the maximum int. But ints are automatically promoted to long, so you usually don’t need to worry about it:
sys.maxint + 1
works fine and returns a long.
sys.maxint does not even exist in Python 3, since int and long were unified into a single arbitrary precision int type.