Re: gnat and heap size

["Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org>]

Sure. But assuming that if you've got an ability to address 2**64 of
anything (bytes, sectors, whatever) then there must be something there
physically you want to retrieve. If its bytes, then you'd need something
storing the binary states of the bits. Presuming that you had a means of
detecting some sort of state change in a single atom, then you'd need 2**64
* 8 (or whatever your byte size is, for those about to observe that a byte
need not be 8 bits) atoms. That might start approaching something a little
too big to get into a laptop. :-)

I wouldn't mind having a 64 bit address - it would allow you to dedicate
whole banks of the address space to various purposes - but actually having
2*64 bytes available to address may be just a wee bit beyond current
technology.

I like holographic memory and remember reading about research on such
devices several years ago. I'm wondering why it never made it out of the
lab? Too expensive? Too hard to produce? Too unreliable? Something must have
got in its way to the market because its been a long time since I heard tell
of the devices working in labs and I don't see any on the shelves at
CompUSA... Hmmmmm.....

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/


"Pascal Obry" <p.obry@wanadoo.fr> wrote in message
news:ulmj1fyac.fsf@wanadoo.fr...
>
> "Marin David Condic" <dont.bother.mcondic.auntie.spam@[acm.org> writes:
>
> >  I doubt that it would be practically possible to construct a disk big
> > enough to hold 2**64 bytes of data as a result. :-)
>
> Well well... Somebody said that only 3 or 4 ENIAC would be needed in the
> world because it was so powerful...
>