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Is there some pre-defined constant like INT_MAX?

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  • It is 2^31 - 1 in Python 32 and 2^63 - 1 Python 64 bit runtime system. Commented Feb 11, 2020 at 12:15

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Python has arbitrary precision integers so there is no true fixed maximum. You're only limited by available memory.

In Python 2, there are two types, int and long. ints use a C type, while longs are arbitrary precision. You can use sys.maxint to find the maximum int. But ints are automatically promoted to long, so you usually don't need to worry about it:

sys.maxint + 1

works fine and returns a long.

sys.maxint does not even exist in Python 3, since int and long were unified into a single arbitrary precision int type.

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4 Comments

Note that in Python 3 (and Python 2.6 and up) sys.maxsize can be used when you need an arbitrarily-large value.
is there one that is not a long?
sys.maxsize continues to be the theoretical limit on size of containers for python 2 and 3 (theoretical because memory is the real limiting factor)
@mattdm sys.maxsize+1 is larger than that.

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