Sun and Dell both sell 64-bit boxes. But the core question is why have two different types at all? This issue is timely because I just got an error in code that looks vaguely like: h<-openFile "foo" AppendMode pos <- hFileSize h hPutStr $ show something hClose h content <- readFile "foo" return $ take pos content This code produces an error because (madness!): hFileSize::Handle -> IO Integer take::forall a. Int -> [a]->[a] I have to assume conversion between files and lists is not all that rare even in beginner code. Note: I don't really care whether everything is 64bit Int or Integer. I just find having to care about this point in such trivial code ridiculous. And re sizeFM, I would note that Google has more than 2^31 pages indexed in memory. -Alex- _________________________________________________________________ S. Alexander Jacobson mailto:me@alexjacobson.com tel:917-770-6565 http://alexjacobson.com On Sun, 25 Apr 2004, David Roundy wrote:
On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 03:20:42PM -0400, S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:
QUESTION: "I read in a newspaper that in l981 you said '640K of memory should be enough for anybody.' What did you mean when you said this?"
ANSWER: "I've said some stupid things and some wrong things, but not that. No one involved in computers would ever say that a certain amount of memory is enough for all time."
http://www.wired.com/news/print/0,1294,1484,00.html
Dell's Poweredge servers address up to 32GB of memory today! There are already 5.7 billion people on the planet (>2^31) and 741 million phone lines. In my mind, there is NO QUESTION that 2^31 keys is a reasonable size for a FiniteMap or will be in the very very near future.
On the other hand, since they are still 32 bit computers, any given application can still only access 4G of memory. This issue will only be a problem on 64 bit platforms which have a 32 bit Int.
Moreover, it is not clear that the CPU/memory overhead of returning Integer rather than Int for sizeFM is sufficiently high to be worth bothering the programmer about.
I'd say that rather than returning an Integer, we'd be better off just using a 64 bit Int on 64 platforms. -- David Roundy http://www.abridgegame.org _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users