Should r.length of type ulong be supported on 32-bit systems?

Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Fri Sep 30 20:58:29 PDT 2016


On 9/30/2016 7:31 PM, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> https://github.com/dlang/phobos/pull/4827 still allows that but specifies that
> phobos algorithms are not required to. -- Andrei

A couple instances where a length may be longer than the address space:

1. large files
2. sequences of mathematically generated values

I don't see a particular advantage to restricting hasLength() to be size_t or 
ulong. Whether an algorithm requires the length to be within the addressable 
capabilities of the CPU or not should be up to the algorithm.

There is also cause for r.length to return an int even on a 64 bit system - it 
can be more efficient.


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