Charles Sardeson wrote:
Friday, April 21, 2006, 4:02:03 AM, Johnny Andersson wrote:
JA> Actually I really don't understand the point in having a limit at all.
Well, there sort of isn't one, so you're about right.
The problem is that folks in this business are both optimistic (Sure, I can
have that done by, oh, six pm) and pessimistic (no one will ever need more than
64K of memory, and they couldn't afford it if they did.)
If you fiddle with the numbers for a while, you'll discover that 256 X 64K is a
reasonable limit because those are the maximum unsigned values in the number of
bits allocated for the indices to the table of cells: 256 is the maximum number
of values one can fit in two hexadecimal digits (FF=255, and there's zero), and
65535 is the corresponding max for four bytes, 0xFFFF. Adding the 65537th row
requires that every instance of the row index in the code be redefined to be
twice as big (FFFFFFFF) and perhaps the same for the column limit (FFFF).
4,294,967,296 (FFFFFFFF+1) would be the new limit for rows. And that's only
slightly bigger than the number of code changes required to make it happen ;-)
Hope that helps.
Chuck
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It probably doesn't matter much today with faster processors and more
memory, but a change like that would also involve making everything
bigger - both programs and data files. And, because it was bigger, it
would involve more disk access and processing time to handle. So, aside
from the programming difficulties, there would be a performance hit for
a benefit most users don't need. (I've seen a lot of posts here about
OOo being or starting up too slow now!)
Not being a big spreadsheet user, I can't imagine having a spreadsheet
that's anywhere near as big as the current limits. It seems that it
would be extremely unwieldy and very easy to get lost in and make
unintentional changes that would be extremely difficult to locate and
repair. I don't think anybody would need to write a spreadsheet program
anywhere near that big that wouldn't be better split into separate
sheets or programs, so the rest must be data rows.
As has been said here many times before, if you've got that much data,
the only effective way to deal with it is through the use of external
files using things like databases.
If all you have (know) is a hammer, everything looks like a nail
(spreadsheet).
Joe
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