2 PEP 237: Unifying Long Integers and Integers

The lengthy transition process for this PEP, begun in Python 2.2, takes another step forward in Python 2.4. In 2.3, certain integer operations that would behave differently after int/long unification triggered FutureWarning warnings and returned values limited to 32 or 64 bits (depending on your platform). In 2.4, these expressions no longer produce a warning and instead produce a different result that's usually a long integer.

The problematic expressions are primarily left shifts and lengthy hexadecimal and octal constants. For example, 2 << 32 results in a warning in 2.3, evaluating to 0 on 32-bit platforms. In Python 2.4, this expression now returns the correct answer, 8589934592.