Martin v. Löwis wrote: > Please let me know what you think. > > Regards, > Martin > > PEP: XXX > Title: Using ssize_t as the index type > Version: $Revision$ > Last-Modified: $Date$ > Author: Martin v. Löwis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> > Status: Draft > Type: Standards Track > Content-Type: text/x-rst > Created: 18-Dec-2005 > Post-History: > > > Abstract > ======== > > In Python 2.4, indices of sequences are restricted to the C type > int. On 64-bit machines, sequences therefore cannot use the full > address space, and are restricted to 2**31 elements. This PEP proposes > to change this, introducing a platform-specific index type > Py_ssize_t. An implementation of the proposed change is in > http://svn.python.org/projects/python/branches/ssize_t.
Sounds wonderful. Would love to see this in Python 2.5. This will fix important 64-bit issues. Perhaps someone could explain to me what the difference between Py_ssize_t and Py_intptr_t would be? Is this not a satisfactory Py_ssize_t already? > > > Rationale > ========= > > 64-bit machines are becoming more popular, and the size of main memory > increases beyond 4GiB. On such machines, Python currently is limited, > in that sequences (strings, unicode objects, tuples, lists, > array.arrays, ...) cannot contain more than 2GiElements. > > Today, very few machines have memory to represent larger lists: as > each pointer is 8B (in a 64-bit machine), one needs 16GiB to just hold > the pointers of such a list; with data in the list, the memory > consumption grows even more. However, there are three container types > for which users request improvements today: > > * strings (currently restricted to 2GiB) > * mmap objects (likewise; plus the system typically > won't keep the whole object in memory concurrently) > * Numarray objects (from Numerical Python) scipy_core objects are the replacement for both Numarray and Numerical Python and support 64-bit clean objects *except* for the sequence protocol and the buffer protocol. Fixing this problem will clean up a lot of unnecessary code. Looking forward to it... -Travis _______________________________________________ Python-Dev mailing list Python-Dev@python.org http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-dev Unsubscribe: http://mail.python.org/mailman/options/python-dev/archive%40mail-archive.com
