Internally, Python uses two kinds of numbers. The conversion between these two is seamless and automatic.
For smallish numbers, Python will generally use 4 or 8 byte integer values. Details are buried in CPython's internals, and depend on the facilities of the C-compiler used to build Python.
For largish numbers, over sys.maxsize, Python switches to large integer numbers which are sequences of digits. Digit, in this case, often means a 30-bit value.
How many ways can we permute a standard deck of 52 cards? The answer is 52! ≈ 8 × 1067. Here's how we can compute that large number. We'll use the factorial function in the math module, shown as follows:
>>> import math >>> math.factorial(52) 80658175170943878571660636856403766975289505440883277824000000000000 ...
