Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1651

I intend to live for a long time and I do expect such a thing. It should happen when people turn holographic 3D movies into a simple business. Movie makers will want to edit the movies, and it sure is easier if the whole movie fits in memory.

A good 3D movie would be all around the spectator, within a cube of width, say, 25 meters (I use this length because it is the width of a good theater screen near my home -- 12.5m should be far enough so that an illusion of distance can be rendered without two many artefacts by a simple flat screen). For a good definition, close objects will need pixels no wider than 0.1mm, while farther objects will accomodate wider pixels. Let's buttume an average cubic pixel of width 1mm. We want that pixel to have some color; let's give it 32 bits (which is not really wide while editing: 12 bits for each of red, green and blue would be better). A 3-hour movie with 24 images par second will use about 1.6e18 bytes. That's just a bit below 2^64, but already above 2^63. Hence a signed 64-bit integer type is not "good enough".

SF writers have shown much more imagination on the subject.

--Thomas lovein