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| author | Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> | 2010-12-21 18:49:01 (GMT) |
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| committer | Antoine Pitrou <solipsis@pitrou.net> | 2010-12-21 18:49:01 (GMT) |
| commit | f259076790dac0b0c596a4545f05967d9cc76f65 (patch) | |
| tree | 7d838fccf0f29e8dc490fe5afd7bd835a88423e7 /Doc/library/platform.rst | |
| parent | e0436bcb24e266b9391c7fd866224adcb33c5d34 (diff) | |
| download | cpython-f259076790dac0b0c596a4545f05967d9cc76f65.zip cpython-f259076790dac0b0c596a4545f05967d9cc76f65.tar.gz cpython-f259076790dac0b0c596a4545f05967d9cc76f65.tar.bz2 | |
Suggest sys.maxsize as a reliable way to know whether the interpreter is 64-bit.
(part of #10735)
Diffstat (limited to 'Doc/library/platform.rst')
| -rw-r--r-- | Doc/library/platform.rst | 12 |
1 files changed, 11 insertions, 1 deletions
diff --git a/Doc/library/platform.rst b/Doc/library/platform.rst index 1fe1031..ee0dc31 100644 --- a/Doc/library/platform.rst +++ b/Doc/library/platform.rst @@ -36,6 +36,16 @@ Cross Platform and then only if the executable points to the Python interpreter. Reasonable defaults are used when the above needs are not met. + .. note:: + + On Mac OS X (and perhaps other platforms), executable files may be + universal files containing multiple architectures. + + To get at the "64-bitness" of the current interpreter, it is more + reliable to query the :attr:`sys.maxsize` attribute:: + + is_64bits = sys.maxsize > 2**32 + .. function:: machine() @@ -186,7 +196,7 @@ Windows Platform .. note:: - Note: this function works best with Mark Hammond's + This function works best with Mark Hammond's :mod:`win32all` package installed, but also on Python 2.3 and later (support for this was added in Python 2.6). It obviously only runs on Win32 compatible platforms. |