Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!aplcen!samsung!cs.utexas.edu!rice!news
From: cliffc@sicilia.rice.edu (Cliff Click)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Extremely Fast Filesystems
Message-ID: <1990Aug7.193936.14351@rice.edu>
Date: 7 Aug 90 19:39:36 GMT
References: <30728@super.ORG> <13667@cbmvax.commodore.com> <1990Aug7.190719.7907@caen.engin.umich.edu>
Sender: news@rice.edu (News)
Organization: Rice University, Houston
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In article <1990Aug7.190719.7907@caen.engin.umich.edu> pha@caen.engin.umich.edu (Paul H. Anderson) writes:
[ ...stuff about huge files... ]

Seems a step in the right direction would be to include transparent "bignums" 
as a standard part of a programming language.  Thus the applications 
programmer writes his programs that don't care how big the file gets (the
system read/write/seek call must handle "bignums").  The smart compiler
can figure out when everything's going to remain as "small integers" and
skip the expensive run-time check code when it can be avoided.  

How the OS maps the "bignum" to physical devices is a less difficult nut 
to crack- one can always shoot for an easy & slow solution (bank swapping,
paging, etc...).  

The problems are 1) getting applications into a world/language which has
no size restrictions on integers, and 2) getting compilers which can prevent
the grotesque performance hits from generic "bignum" handling (a topic
which is somewhat close to my heart ;-).

Cliff Bignum Click
-- 
Cliff Click                
cliffc@owlnet.rice.edu