[Python-Dev] One more dict trick

[Eric S. Raymond]

M.-A. Lemburg <mal@lemburg.com>:
> In any case, this will avoid use the trouble of having to check
> those poly numbers every time Intel decides to bump the register
> width by another factor of two ;-)

This seems unlikely.  

2^64 = 18446744073709551616, which is roughly 10 ^ 22.  Let's assume 
a memory density, of, say 2^20 machine words or roughly 8 megabytes per 
cubic centimeter (much, *much* better than we'll be able to do for the 
forseeable future -- remember power distribution and heat dissipation).
Then, approximating the cubic relation between a sphere's volume and area 
by lopping off a power of four, we see that 2^64 64-bit words of memory 
would occupy a sphere of roughly 2^(64 - 20 - 2) cm radius, or about 
17 million kilometers.  

This is roughly twice the diameter of the Sun.  64-bit computers
aren't going to run out of address space any time soon.

64-bit clocks counting seconds will turn over in approximately six
trillion years, long after the expansion of the Universe will have
dropped its energy density low enough to make computation...well, 
let's just say "difficult" and leave it at that.

Nobody needs 128 bits of integer or floating-point precision, either.
There's basically no source of data to compute with that's got
anywhere near 22 significant digits of accuracy -- 48 bits is
about the most people in scientific computing ever use.
-- 
		<a href="http://www.tuxedo.org/~esr/">Eric S. Raymond</a>

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