[NNTP] 64-bit article counter extension strawman

[Clive D.W. Feather]

Forrest J. Cavalier III said:
> I dislike specified limits in standards.

Agreed, though sometimes you have to live with them.

> At the time this WG group started, the 32 bit rollover seemed like a
> good way of dealing with article number that are too high.

We never agreed text with a rollover mechanism in it. The final consensus
was that the client would have to have a one-off breakage if it hit the
limit.

> It seems that people are willing
> to declare software that overflows at 31-bits as "poor implementations
> we don't support" but they are not willing to declare software that
> overflows at 32 bits in the same class.

I'm not doing that. Indeed, if anyone had pointed out to me - 8 years ago -
that code used signed ints rather than unsigned, I would have used 2^31-1
instead in the text I wrote.

> MSVC has 64 bit integer types for what, 8 years now, and that generates
> code that runs on 386's.  GCC has supported "long long" for just about
> that long or longer.

Not all of us use only Windows and GCC.

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