Re: Language question
@Kristian Walsh - Just to address your point about how Python handles integers, what you describe is how Python version 2 did things. Starting with version 3 all integers are "long" integers, there are no more "short" (native) integers.
What this means is that there are no longer unexpected results caused by integers getting promoted to long (this wasn't a problem for the actual integer value at run time, but more one of the type changing causing complications when inspecting types in unit tests). Eliminating the need for Python to check whether an integer was a "short" or "long" integer each time an object was accessed meant that there was no performance penalty to simply making them all long.
For the sake of those who don't know what the above means, with Python it is impossible for integers to over flow because they are not restricted to the size of native integers but can be infinitely large. This is a big help as you don't have to add integer overflow checking to your own code.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
