At 08:42 PM 2/28/99 -0800, you wrote:
>Now here's a possible place where the NewCompiledMethod stuff might have an
>immediate benefit - simply allow use of LargePositiveIntegers as source
>pointers. Infinite (almost) file sizes! None of this pathetic 64 bit
>limitation in the Windows api! Now just give me an infinitely big disk....

We already have (almost) infinitely big disks, on a volume called the
Internet. You have to use filenames like
"http://www.smalltalk.org/index.html". It's a very curious volume, with
multiple root directories, like "http://www.yahoo.com". Parts of it also
randomly change, sometimes on a regular basis. Most of the volume is also
write protected to most processes. You can also access byte ranges on many
of the files (using HTTP 1.1 byte range requests).

Let's see, some extreemly bogus size calculations might be:

500,000 web servers
10 MBytes of content on each (yes I know, some have LOTS more, but some
also have lots less)

That's about 10,000,000 * 500,000 = 5 terabytes, about 2^42 bytes.

Actually I believe WinNT volumes are currently limited to 32-bits of
sectors. Which is only about 2 terabytes. So even though you have a 64-bit
file offset, you can never reach that (mabey on NT 5 with a sparse file).
The REALLY odd thing about this 2 Terabyte limit is that's currently disks
only cost about $20/gigabyte, so 2 terabytes is only $40,000 worth of disk
drives. Allow triple that for power and sheetmetal and controllers.

You could also easily stretch the Squeak changes file size limit by forcing
changes to be on some align boundry (space padded), like 16 bytes, and then
scale the offset. This seems like it would be trivial to do, and not expand
the changes horribly (unless you have 16M of 4 byte doit's). This little
change could allow changes files up to 256 MByte. I didn't look at the
sources though, so this idea may suffer from foot in mouth disease. You
could also put some tag in the beginning of a new format changes file to
signify it was new format. Compressing the changes to a new file could
write the new format, which could then expand bigger.

- Jan

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