> It's only a hack in the sense that platform.architecture is the
> documented interface in the std library to report "bits" and,
> unfortunately, users try to use it to determine whether running in
> 64-bit or 32-bit mode.  For instance, see here:
> http://permalink.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.general/676626

Well, the fact that platform.architecture() returns a free-form string
suggests to me that it could return all kinds of unexpected results
depending on the system (it probably parses the output of some command).
So perhaps the platform docs should warn against this.