The simple explanation of why I like Python's large integer support(somewhat misleadingly called longs for historical reasons) is that theymake it convenient to deal with arbitrarily large binary numbers.These crop up surprisingly often, sometimes because a large bunch ofbits is the natural representation of things like IPv6 addresses, andsometimes because they make algorithms clearer and simpler.

For example, take the job of generating a random password that's drawnfrom a given alphabet. The simple approach to doing this is:

from math

I was recently writing a random password generator and in the processit occurred to me that there is an important difference between randompasswords and good passwords, because we mean different things by thoseterms.

A truly random password is one that an attacker can't guess betterthan through random chance even if they know your password generationalgorithm, so that on average they would have to try half of all of thepossible passwords before successfully guessing yours.

(How many possible passwords there are is based on how many bits of

Part of validating a SSL certificate is making sure that it is a SSLcertificate for what you are actually connecting to, to avoid thepossibility of a man in the middle attack. SSL certificates for websiteshave a field (the CN portion of the 'Distinguished Name') that names thehost they are for, and so target validation consists of checking thatthe certificate's CN is the same name as the host portion of the URL.

This checking is pretty literally a string compare; the web browserdoes not