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Date: Thu, 22 Jan 2015 06:06:10 +1100
Subject: Re: How to "wow" someone new to Python
From: Chris Angelico <rosuav@gmail.com>
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On Thu, Jan 22, 2015 at 5:20 AM, Irmen de Jong <irmen.NOSPAM@xs4all.nl> wrote:
> On 21-1-2015 18:59, Steve Hayes wrote:
>
>> 3. When I started to look at it, I found that strings could be any length and
>> were not limited to swomething arbitrary, like 256 characters.
>
> Even more fun is that Python's primitive integer type (longs for older Python versions)
> has no arbitrary limitation either.
>
> That amazed me at the time I discovered python :)

I hadn't worked with length-limited strings in basically forever
(technically BASIC has a length limit, but I never ran into it; and I
never did much with Pascal), but you're right, arbitrary-precision
integers would have impressed me a lot more if I hadn't first known
REXX. So... is there a way to show that off efficiently? Normally, any
calculation that goes beyond 2**32 has already gone way beyond most
humans' ability to hold the numbers in their heads.

ChrisA