Re: Memory
- Posted by Robert Craig <rds at EMAIL.MSN.COM> Jan 08, 1999
- 959 views
Carl R White writes: > I seem to remember you saying a while back that Euphoria > uses 31-bit integers. The missing bit being used to indicate > whether the data at a location is an address or an integer. > Surely this means Euphoria can only address 2^31 (~2Gig). Euphoria *can* use the full 4Gig. (I don't want to go into all the implementation details.) > Cheeky Request: Any chance of adding 64-bit integers and double length > floats in the near future? Or auto-promotion if things get > too big? An implementor of Euphoria has a lot of freedom. He can store atoms and sequences in any memory layout that he wants - the Euphoria programmer can't tell whether an atom is stored in one bit, one byte, 4 bytes, a double, a 64-bit integer etc. Since there are no pointers in Euphoria, people can't go picking through the memory layout of a data object. This lets implementers of Euphoria change the layout without breaking any existing code. Euphoria currently uses 64-bit double-precision floating-point internally. If 128-bit were available, at the same speed, then Euphoria might start to use it. Euphoria could also use 64-bit machine integers to store integer values. The "integer" type in Euphoria has been defined as 31-bits, and some rare code might break if that were changed. We could instead add a new type for 64-bit integers. But keep in mind that, unlike other languages, Euphoria does not *have* to define a new type, in order to utilize a new machine storage format. In fact, Euphoria doesn't really care what type you declare for a variable -- Euphoria will store and manipulate data *values* in whatever form is convenient. In Euphoria types are optional - they are there to catch errors and provide some documentation. They do not dictate the format of data in memory. Regards, Rob Craig Rapid Deployment Software http://members.aol.com/FilesEu/