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.
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.