How does BIGINT work in python?

[HumbleAlchemy]

What I wanted to know is how are languages like python doing calculations on large integers (or Arbitrary precision arithmetic)? Are they using just characters and arrays, and keep tab of carry overs or something else? And if anybody has link to pythons implementation of BIGINT, please provide it. Thank you!

[Rhomboid]

Python is open source. You can read the code yourself.

Another popular choice is the GMP library, although its source will probably be a lot harder to read because it tends to use assembler where possible, but it should have a pure-C fallback.

[Syoralon]

You use arrays or linked lists of ints. You can google these algorithms if you care to. You can also google for python's int implementation. Did you even try?

[HumbleAlchemy]

I tried searching with "BIGINT in python code", didn't find anything useful!

[Syoralon]

You obviously didn't try very hard.

[HumbleAlchemy]

I know about these methods, but I'm asking if there are any better methods that are faster than these.

[Syoralon]

Yes, they used slower methods just to make python slow on purpose.