Warp  wrote in message <44cfee79@news.povray.org>:
> (except for the added address space if there's more than 4 gigabytes
> of memory in the computer).

Actually, you do not need more than 4GB of physical memory to get the
advantages of 64bit addressing: it is enough to have more than 4GB
(actually, 3 or so, on most modern operating systems, because the kernel
keeps some address space for itself) of _virtual_ memory.

Sometimes, it is faster to let the system handle swapping on a few page
faults than put tests and indirections everywhere in the program to check
for the availability of such or such data structure.

Sometimes, it is much slower, agreed. This depends completely on the shape
of the memory access of the program, and it is something very hard to
predict. But it is always much _simpler_ to rely on the system's virtual
memory.

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