One way to reliably get the limits of floating point formats is to construct the values from their binary representation with struct.

import struct
FLOAT_MAX = struct.unpack('>f', b'\x7f\x7f\xff\xff')
FLOAT_MIN = struct.unpack('>f', b'\xff\x7f\xff\xff')
MAX_DOUBLE = struct.unpack('>d', b'\x7f\xef\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff')
MIN_DOUBLE = struct.unpack('>d', b'\xff\xef\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff\xff')

You can use a decorator:

import sys
def noInf(f):
  def wrapped(*args, **kwargs):
    res = f(*args, **kwargs)
    if res == float('inf'):
      return sys.float_info.max
    return res
  return wrapped

@noInf
def myMult(x, y):
  return x*y

print(myMult(sys.float_info.max, 2)) # prints 1.79769313486e+308

For numerical comparisons, +- float("inf") should work.

It doesn't always work (but covers the realistic cases):

print(list(sorted([float("nan"), float("inf"), float("-inf"), float("nan"), float("nan")])))
# NaNs sort above and below +-Inf
# However, sorting a container with NaNs makes little sense, so not a real issue.

To have objects that compare as higher or lower to any other arbitrary objects (including inf, but excluding other cheaters like below), you can create classes that state their max/min-ness in their special methods for comparisons:

class _max:
    def __lt__(self, other): return False
    def __gt__(self, other): return True

class _min:
    def __lt__(self, other): return True
    def __gt__(self, other): return False

MAX, MIN = _max(), _min()

print(list(sorted([float("nan"), MAX, float('inf'), MIN, float('-inf'), 0,float("nan")])))
# [<__main__._min object at 0xb756298c>, nan, -inf, 0, inf, nan, <__main__._max object at 0xb756296c>]

Of course, it takes more effort to cover the 'or equal' variants. And it will not solve the general problem of being unable to sort a list containing Nones and ints, but that too should be possible with a little wrapping and/or decorate-sort-undecorate magic (e.g. sorting a list of tuples of (typename, value)).

>>> import sys
>>> sys.float_info
sys.float_info(max=1.7976931348623157e+308, max_exp=1024, max_10_exp=308,
 min=2.2250738585072014e-308, min_exp=-1021, min_10_exp=-307, dig=15,
 mant_dig=53, epsilon=2.2204460492503131e-16, radix=2, rounds=1)

The smallest is sys.float_info.min (2.2250738585072014e-308) and the biggest is sys.float_info.max (1.7976931348623157e+308). See documentation for other properties.

sys.float_info.min is the normalized min. You can usually get the denormalized min as sys.float_info.min * sys.float_info.epsilon. Note that such numbers are represented with a loss of precision. As expected, the denormalized min is less than the normalized min.

Python 3

In Python 3, this question doesn't apply. The plain int type is unbounded.

However, you might actually be looking for information about the current interpreter's word size, which will be the same as the machine's word size in most cases. That information is still available in Python 3 as sys.maxsize, which is the maximum value representable by a signed word. Equivalently, it's the size of the largest possible list or in-memory sequence.

Generally, the maximum value representable by an unsigned word will be sys.maxsize * 2 + 1, and the number of bits in a word will be math.log2(sys.maxsize * 2 + 2). See this answer for more information.

Python 2

In Python 2, the maximum value for plain int values is available as sys.maxint:

>>> sys.maxint  # on my system, 2**63-1
9223372036854775807

You can calculate the minimum value with -sys.maxint - 1 as shown in the docs.

Python seamlessly switches from plain to long integers once you exceed this value. So most of the time, you won't need to know it.