Comment Re:as is often the case... (Score 1) 42
And wether it was supposed to be allowed or not, I was doing math (addition and comparison) of the numbers it was storing as strings and it wasn't throwing exceptions. Perhaps HP-UX had a wierd version of python 4 years ago?
I don't know about HP-UX, but the distinction between numbers and strings always existed in Python starting from the initial release. Could it be that the HP-UX version was patched somehow? But it sounds weird.
In principle, if you use only additions and comparisons and replace all integers with strings, the program will not raise an exception since both operations are valid for strings as well. It could explain the fact that the program eats too much memory -- doing a lot of string concatenations may cause it. But, of course, the result will be completely different. Again, if you ever had code like foo+1, it would raise an exception...
