[self-interest] Unlimited integer arithmetics?

[Dru Nelson]

I disagree with this.

> Universal addressing, for which you essentially need: number of
>   network addresses in the world * number of bytes on a machine.  The
>   width of an IPv6 address is six bytes.  64-bit integers would leave

IPv6 8 bytes (it's 128 bits of address).


>   only two bytes to address my data.  Since I could easily have well
>   over a terabyte of storage at a reasonable cost, this is ludicrous.
>   Instead, we have six bytes of network address *plus* at least
>   another six bytes to index local storage.

There is nothing preventing your from addressing larger
address spaces if you use a higher protocol layer.
You wouldn't want to send an IP packet to a bit/nibble/byte of
data.

Speaking of IPv6, I think it has TOO many bytes. This is way overkill
for the IP address problem and it doesn't address the routing
issues..

Anyways, back to the interesting talk on large numbers in Self.


--------------

the whole idea that you could do something like deal with large
numbers or change all reals to integers with fractions in a
running system is quite interesting..