Re: view/edit large files

[Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com>]

On Tue, 10 Feb 2009 13:50:46 +0200 Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org> wrote: 

>> From: Miles Bader <miles@gnu.org>
>> If it's an integer, and it fits, it's exact -- there is no loss of precision.

EZ> I was talking about arithmetic operations such as multiplication by
EZ> small factors, such as 2, in case it wasn't clear.

While time values and file offsets can certainly be represented as
floats under some constraints, I think it's an inelegant solution.

This is the chance to have a clean design for support of large integers,
since I or someone else will be modifying insert-file-contents anyhow.
Why not add a int64 type?  It doesn't have to be supported everywhere,
and it can fail `integerp' as long as simple arithmetic works (in fact,
only + - < > need to support it for the file offsets work).  We can have
int64p and int-any-size-p as well.  The time functions can be modified
to support either the old-style conses or an int64.  The support for
int64 can be gradually grown; when people need it they can implement
it.  Scratch the itch.

I'm definitely not an expert on the Emacs internals, so this may be
completely untenable and it's probably been debated to death, but I hope
we can at least get started with a int64 implementation I can use for
large file support.

Thanks
Ted