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From: rbowman <bowman@montana.com>
Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers,comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: The joy of FORTRAN
Date: 4 Mar 2025 20:26:57 GMT
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On Tue, 4 Mar 2025 13:12:29 -0500, c186282 wrote:

>    Mostly we don't HAVE to use positional recs anymore since
>    memory/storage has increased so much. Wasn't always that way however
>    ....

True, but the stuff lingers on.  When the dinosaurs roamed the earth 
someome used 'short' for an object number to save those precious bytes. 
Whoda thunk there would ever be more than 32K objects in the system?

We gained a little headroom by going to 'unsigned short'. It was rare but, 
surprise, there could be an attempt to create more than 64K objects.

But there we were with a struct that was the bedrock of the system 
handcuffed by a decision in the '90s. Bump it to a unsigned int? Sure, and 
affect every thing in the system including the databases.