Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard 1658

Change the numbers in the above paragraph and it has happened before. Many times. So it turns out that somebody needs 100K more than 64- bit even, it's not enough. Probably don't need 128 bits to solve it, but you might see something in between even. We ALREADY have 128-bit registers in some CPUs. Let's not pretend that they'll never be used. 32-bit computers existed long before you could buy a otherboard that came anywhere near holding that much memory. Virtual memory doesn't care about motherboard limitations.

I notice you chose to ignore the other half of the story, namely getting int64 to work on systems with no inherent 64-bit capability.

It doesn't matter how long it takes, as in *all* cases, sizet is guaranteed to be the correct type for this, whereas for *most* platforms, int64 will *not* be the appropriate type. I am not referring to the number of PCs in the market, but the number of unique CPU architectures for which you can buy current production hardware and program on it with a C compiler.

Let's not also forget that sizeof() returns sizet. That malloc() expects a sizet. You want to forever be listening to the compiler whine about that, or casting it away? Go for it.

If none of the above phased you, I doubt anything further would work either.

-- Randy Howard (2reply remove FOOBAR) "Making it hard to do stupid things often makes it hard to do smart ones too." -- Andrew Koenig