Re: Patch: Promoting characters to 31 bits (for discussion)

"Stephen J. Turnbull" <turnbull(a)sk.tsukuba.ac.jp&gt; writes: Note that no editor on 32-bit systems can grok a >2G buffer because of limited pointer size. Thus a 1G limit is just one step below the "theoretical" limit. You can argue that being two steps below it is not much worse, but I am not really convinced. What does direct UCS-4 support in characters buy me anyway? Will it be another case of all-encompassing Mule priorities breaking the neck of the rest of us? Implementing bignums is hard because if you want to do it right, you have to modify all the C code that relies on Lisp_Object integers fitting in an integral type called "EMACS_INT" (int or long). And there's a *lot* of such code, with possibly long integers propagating all over the place. Also, with bignums avaialble, you would probably want to provide compiler declarations so that reasonably efficient code can be written, i.e. (declare (fixnum x)). I don't know how hard it is to add this to the current compiler, along with the propagation of types and other niceties, but I suspect it might be hard. See above. Sorry, but the issues are simply not that simple. If everyone thinks 31-bit characters are so much cooler than 31-bit integers, I won't stand in the way of progress. But don't imagine that bignums will save us any time soon.