On Sat, Jul 23, 2011 at 5:32 AM, rantingrick <rantingr...@gmail.com> wrote: > That's nine-quadrillion people! Only for galactic measurements or > microscopic reasons would you need such large numbers. >
Never decide that "nobody would need numbers bigger than X". Someone will. One common thing to do with big numbers is to use the pieces separately; although I would never recommend floating point for encoded numbers like that. But I quite happily treat BIND serial numbers as straightforward integers, and they're usually something like 2011072203 for the 3rd change on the 22nd of July 2011. That's a fairly small example (in fact, BIND requires that serial numbers fit inside a 32-bit integer, IIRC), but there are plenty of other examples of numbers that get big fast because of that sort of thing. ChrisA -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
