[NNTP] 64-bit article counter extension strawman

Matthias Andree matthias.andree at gmx.de
Mon Jul 18 15:56:54 PDT 2005


Russ Allbery <rra at stanford.edu> writes:

> Support of the 64-bit type itself is, as previously noted, not really the
> gating factor.  It's the supporting library functions that are more of a
> problem, and GCC can't help with your printf implementation (for
> example).

practically, software will state minimum requirements to the environment
- and uint64_t has been around since SUS v2 (1997) at the latest, I
don't bother to check how old it really is.

If printf doesn't cut it, well, you'll find dozens of liberally licensed
implementations to format 64-bit unsigned integers into strings on the
net. Besides that, the standard won't specify implementors have to use
printf...

> Saying "there's no limit and you should be prepared for any length of
> article number" says to client authors "you must include a bignum
> library."  That seems a little excessive, and in practice I doubt clients
> will actually do this.  I think we need to be very careful about what we
> say about allowed or recommended client behavior if we really don't
> specify any limit.

Which is a compelling reason /not/ to allow numbers of arbitrary length.

-- 
Matthias Andree



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