Re: get eof real?
Re: get eof real?
- Subject: Re: get eof real?
- From: "John W. Baxter" <email@hidden>
- Date: Mon, 29 Sep 2003 10:45:06 -0700
- Envelope-to: email@hidden
On 9/28/2003 21:11, "Christopher Nebel" <email@hidden> wrote:
>
Particularly astute readers may notice a problem here: since a floating
>
point number needs both exponent and mantissa bits, a 64-bit floating
>
point number can't accurately store all possible 64-bit integers,
>
because there have to be fewer than 64 mantissa bits. In this case,
>
there are 53. Therefore, because the "get eof" result is turned into a
>
real, it will not be precisely accurate if the file size is bigger than
>
53 bits, i.e. 2^53 bytes, aka 8 exabytes, aka 8192 terabytes, or about
>
8 million gigabytes. Since most people don't have hard drives that
>
big, it's not a significant issue yet, but it's something to watch out
>
for. We hope to have a fix by the time it becomes a real issue for
>
normal users.
A sufficiently sparse file (and that's VERY sparse these days, and I don't
know if any present file systems would actually build one) could indeed have
a large enough EOF to cause a problem.
--John (the future lies ahead) Baxter
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