We spent a lot of time exploring how to find the largest number Python could manage. I let the discussion go on for quite a while to stress the fact that this course is about how to think about attacking problems, not what the answer to any particular problem happens to be.
I ended up suggesting that it might be interesting to explore the time
it takes Python to calculate 10**x. For x
small it will be negligible and for x large it will be
essentially forever. You could experiment to find the goldilocks zone
and then draw a graph (in Excel, not yet Python) showing how
computation time depended on x .
I threatened to make this a homework problem, but didn't.
This is as far as we got.