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I would have never guessed that arbitrarily long ints are 
a requirement in your application...
For that application, I'd recommend to use ASN.1 BER as a 
well-document, efficient, binary marshalling format. I 
don't think any other format marshals arbitrary large 
integers in a more compact form. You can find an 
implementation of that in

http://www.cnri.reston.va.us/software/pisces/

or

http://www.enteract.com/~asl2/software/PyZ3950/asn1.py

or

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pysnmp (ber.py)

I'd be in favour of having a BER support library in the 
Python core, but somebody would have to contribute such a 
thing, of course.