Steve Holden <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > Until someone does the experiment this stuff is bound to be > speculation (what's that saying about "premature optimization"?).
40 years of practical Lisp implementation efforts and around the globe and hundreds of published papers on the subject might not be directly Python-specific, but they're not what I'd call a total vacuum of experimental results. > But I can foresee that there'd be problems at the outer edges of the > language: for example, sys.maxint would have to be reduced, and this > in turn would lead to reduction in, for example, the theoretical > maximum length of sequences. if we're talking about 1 tag bit, sys.maxint would be 2**30-1 at the lowest, which means the objects in the sequence would have to be smaller than 4 bytes each if more than sys.maxint of them are supposed to fit in a 32-bit address space. Since we're using 4-byte pointers, that can't happen. We may have a worse problem by running out of virtual address space if we use a copying GC. Of course, on a 64-bit cpu, this all becomes irrelevant. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
