You don't event need strings or lists for that. Just imagine bigger numbers for a and b. Arbitrarily long integer addition is not a native language feature in C.
edit: formatting
fac = lambda n: 1 if n<=1 else n*fac(n-1)
a, b = fac(42), fac(69)
a + b
Joking aside: these are not catch-all comparisons. Nor is the article. But Python is mucher slower and much safer than C. It's easier to start in Python than in C.
return 0;
xor rax, rax
ret