Python 2 and Python 3 provide arbitrary precision integers. This means that you don’t need to worry about overflowing or underflowing the integer datatypes, ever. 2**10000? No problem. It makes it pretty convenient to write code. Floats, however, are not arbitrary precision: >>> a = 2 ** 10000 >>> a * .1 Traceback (most recent call last): File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module> OverflowError: int too large to convert to float Luckily, float overflow throws an exception to alert you to the problem.
