On Wed, 24 Oct 2007 11:26:11 -0700, Darren New wrote:

> Jim Henderson wrote:
>> To someone with a little background in C
> 
> There's the problem right there.  As one professor I knew put it, "There
> are two kinds of languages. The ones that support unbounded arithmetic
> types, and the ones that don't know they need to support unbounded
> arithmetic types."

Yep, I can see that - the need for arbitrary-size variables (and the 
supporting math libraries) has become much more important.

That said, though, I'm talking about a product developed over 10 years 
ago, and from having seen bits of the source code and knowing many of the 
developers, that would've been the "language of choice" at the time.

> I can't tell you how many tools I went through looking for one that
> would handle a file >4G for restartable downloads. I finally had to
> install bittorrent at both ends just to move the file across the
> network.  In spite of the fact that FTP uses ASCII representations for
> all numbers, and hence has no inherent limitation in the protocol.

I see that problem all the time myself as well - I make downloads 
available for a limited audience using a tool that has problems with IE7 
(of all things) because they're too big - FF doesn't have a problem with 
them, and many of the download managers we suggest also work fine (I use 
wget and never have a problem with > 4 GB file sizes).

Jim

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