[gpshead]

I keep wondering if it was as well given code I've had to wrangle that _wants_ twos compliment fixed size math in Python. Both signed and unsigned. But our language tries not to have a bazillion different basic types and the ill-defined Python <= 2 `int` being whatever the platforms `C long` could hold was not great so simplifying to a single integer type in 3 was still a net win AFAICT.

[kragen]

It'd be nice to have a twos-complement fixed-size type too, but I think it's probably better that Python 2's int isn't that.

The problem with transparently overflowing to Python `long` is that, most of the time, the overflow is unintended, and the resulting performance collapse is a bug that's harder to track down than a ValueError.