Re: array indexing... you cant use 'long' ???!
TrevorBoydSmith@gmail.com wrote:
I think the matter that bothers me is having any limit at all. But to
be truthful you don't need to have 2 billion length arrays. Only a
fool would do something like that right now. (in the future ... i.e.
couple of years it might be another story.)
The largest continuous arrays are images. And even then those are only
in the millions. 2048x2048x3 for example. When you go to video
processing it is not continuous flat arrays but rather it is images
stored in an array. or a multidimensional array.
Do you really mean "The largest continuous arrays" or just "The largest
continuous array in home data processing"?
The largest continuous arrays I've met are far bigger than that, in
scientific and engineering programs, and had nothing at all to do with
images. People were solving systems of equations with more than two
billion coefficients back when they had to do it with out-of-core
solvers, shuffling blocks of data between memory and disk, because the
whole array did not fit in memory.
And my experience with large scale linear algebra was a couple of
employers ago, when I was working for FPS and then Cray Research, back
when Java was a type of coffee. Given the general trends, array sizes
have probably increased in the last ten years.
It bothers me to have a limit that prevents application of simple array
techniques to the largest arrays that fit in physical memory on a large
server. People whose arrays are bigger than that are stuck anyway.
Patricia