On 25 Sep 2008, at 02:33, Charles Lindsey wrote:
In <EBCFDD6D-5066-45C4-A322-D10C78B07039@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Thorfinn <thorfinn@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx > writes:*nod* 64 bit is becoming fairly prevalent, and that should certainly be enough.That said - the DNS world is pretty used to using a 32 bit integer circle for comparison.Looking at the current USEPRO text... *ponder* Serial number MUSTincrease. That is definitely a problem - you certainly can run out of 32 bit integer. It's not all that likely, but it's certainly possible.Well, it has taken 30 years for a few heavily populated groups to comewithin sight of overflowing the 32-bit article numbers, and the number of checkgroups messages sent is many orders of magnitude less than what such groups have seen. So I think 32 bits is fine. People still regard 32 bits as the 'normal' length of an integer, even though modern hardware is ableto cope with 64bit, especially for addresses.
*nod* I'm pretty comfortable with no numerical limit on checkgroups serial number (i.e., stick with the current text). There's no good reason to treat the serial number as an binary integer at all... it's perfectly orderable using trim leading zeros, then compare with string length followed by ascii ordering after that. It's not exactly a comparison you have to do very often.
Offtopic:NNTP article numbers, different story - there are, after all, rather a lot more of them on a busy news server, and they are potentially needed as index entries and such.
Sequence space arithmetic is definitely good if you're playing with a limited number space - the DNS folks had it right way back then. :-)
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