On Sun, Apr 25, 2004 at 03:18:20PM -0400, S. Alexander Jacobson wrote:
[..] 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.
I understand the Int type to be as large as pointers on each kind of hardware. So one cannot possible have any data structure whose size doesn't fit in an 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.
Well, Int is built-in to any hardware, while Integer isn't. Since Int/Integer is one of the most used data types in almost any program, the difference would be _very_ big. Robert