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:[EMAIL PROTECTED] 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 > [EMAIL PROTECTED] > http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users > _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
