>Seeing as there are about 10^85 atoms in the universe
More realistically the number that can be addressed by 64 bits. It must be 64, you're already over the amount that can be addressed by 32 bits (something just over 2 billion). 64 bits will address some exponent number that you won't have to worry about with current technology, which means well before that number, you will run into the limit imposed by the amount of memory and free disk space you have.
And you can't use all of that. From that you must subtract at least one virtual swap partition (in memory) and one real swap partition (on disk) and some memory for the program to run and even so it's going to be slow, real slow... start it and go home for the weekend slow.. start it and go on vacation show... start it and hope the computer lasts until it finishes slow :)
If you're talking how much you can read in, I don't know this for a fact, but I suspect that when you do this @a = <FH> and the book says it puts that whole file in the array in memory that's just a convenient way of thinking of it. I suspect that what really happens is, if that file is very large it only deals with one buffer full at time and that's usually set at about 8k for optimum disk performance. Well, in the old days it was 8k anyway (you know two/three years ago:), on a machine with 8 gig in memory, and the disk drive that must go with that much memory, that "most efficient buffer size" could no doubt have gone up a bit.
ms
At 12:05 PM 8/18/03, you wrote:
On 18 Aug 2003, Subrahmanyam Vadlamani wrote in perl:
> Suppose I want to read in large text files and want to > do something with them. Are there any theoritical > limits on the process size of a perl script?
Seeing as there are about 10^85 atoms in the universe, I don't think you could have a file bigger than 10^85 bits. :-)
I'm reminded of a doctored traffic sign that my high-school physics teacher had on the wall of his classroom: "Speed limit 3*10^8 m/s".
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