[comp.lang.pascal] HUGE arrays

john@uunet.uu.net (John Baima) (09/01/89)

All you have to do is tell Borland/Microsoft how you propose to get
these huge arrays on a 16 bit machine like the 8088 and I'm sure they
would do it. Don't hold your breath, however.

I would suppose that some of the 386 Pascal compilers have huge arrays
when running under a DOS extender. There, of course, you have a full
32 bit addressing scheme and things are quite different.

People have come up with ways of making multidimensional arrays that
access data that is greater than 64k, but that is only possible by
using pointers. DOS is limited to segment:offset addressing and
neither the segment or the offset can be larger than 64k because they
are 16 bit integers. There is simply no reasonable way around that
limitation. 

john baima
d024jkb@utarlg.bitnet