I can't figure out any reason that we'd need to use long explicitly here
as python implicitly moves from a C long int to python Long
automatically under the covers. My best guess is that it was originally
used so that the facts module would work on python-2.2 where the user
had to convert a number from int to long manually but python-2.4 is our
current baseline.
long isn't present on Python3 so now is a good time to remove this
cruft. (We had a workaround for Python3; this commit also removes the
workaround.)
7728d70bea