title: How do you handle extremely large values in python?
body: <p>How would I get python to work with values of the order of magnitude of 1099511627776 bits large (yeah. 137 gb)? I some what need to implement this (or if you can suggest a better way to do it, will change methods). apparently, pgp's new length types have 3 sections instead of 2. now they are: length type, value-of-length-type, and the length. length type is 2 bits, which translates to 191 bytes, 8383 bytes, 4294967296 bytes, or partial length. the length is then encoded in bytes. how would i check if a value is less than 4294967296 bytes large if i cant even do <code>1 &lt;&lt; (4294967296 &lt;&lt; 8)</code>? it is too big to fit in even a long.</p>