Re: Reading portions of large files

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: David Kastrup <dak@gnu.org>
> Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help
> Date: 10 Jan 2003 21:51:49 +0100
> 
> BTW, would it be terribly complicated to extend the range of Lisp
> integers to 31bit?

It's not terribly hard, but IIRC the current consensus among the Emacs
maintainers is that it's not important enough to do that because
before long all machines will have 64-bit compilers.

Perhaps this should be discussed again on the developers' list.

> Integers don't need any garbage collection or tag bits per se.

They need to be distinguishable from other Lisp types, so their tag
bitfield cannot have an arbitrary bit pattern.

> Emacs has a most-positive-fixnum of 134217727, while XEmacs has
> 1073741823, more than 8 times as much.  So it would appear to be
> possible in theory.

IIRC, the XEmacs way requires extensive changes in how Emacs works,
but I don't remember the details.