The following can be used to generate a file called mega_concat.py:

N = 2**17
my_array = []
for i in range(N):
  my_array.append("\"\"")
print '+'.join(my_array)

Then, on Ubuntu 14.04, 32-bit:

$ python mega_concat.py 
Segmentation fault (core dumped)
$ python3 mega_concat.py 
RuntimeError: maximum recursion depth exceeded during compilation

Seems like this is a simple out-of-memory issue.