OpenEuphoria

Re: Limit of allocate()

• Posted by Robert Craig <rds at RapidEuphoria.com> Jun 09, 2007
• 645 views

Juergen Luethje wrote:
> Hi Rob,
> 
> in "machine.e" it reads:
>    global function allocate(positive_int n)
> 
> so the biggest possible argument for allocate() is
> #3FFFFFFF (= 1 Gigabyte - 1 Byte). Maybe a short note
> about this limit in the documentation of allocate()
> would be useful.

Thanks for pointing that out.
As more people start buying machines with over 1Gb RAM,
and especially over 4Gb, there will be a lot of places
in the documentation where "notes" like this will be
needed, at least until Euphoria moves to 64-bit integers etc.
I hesitate to start documenting this just yet. It could be
a big "can of worms" to get into.

> ( I think at the time when you implemented the allocate()
>   function, it probably was hard to imagine that a normal
>   PC would have more than 1 GB RAM.  )

Yes it was.
The first machine that Euphoria ran on, an Atari Mega ST,
had 4 Mb of RAM (huge at the time). The first IBM PC clone 
(used for Euphoria 1.0) had 8 Mb.

Regards,
   Rob Craig
   Rapid Deployment Software
   http://www.RapidEuphoria.com