From: "John M. Aldrich" <fighteer AT cs DOT com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.msdos.djgpp
Subject: Re: ifstream (FILENAME, ios::binary). Can't Read!!!
Date: Thu, 24 Jul 1997 20:20:17 +0000
Organization: Two pounds of chaos and a pinch of salt
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A. Sinan Unur wrote:
> 
> > > do you ever expect to read a fractional number of bytes from a file?
> >
> > No, I just used it cause I always think of doubles as being able to
> > count to a higher number than ints.
> 
> for reasons that are too mundane to explain and take up bandwidth with,
> that is not a good idea. if you insist, you can do it of course, but you
> will be in for a pretty hectic ride.

If, for some reason, you seriously expect that your program might read
more than 4 billion bytes of data from a file, you can use the long long
integer type.  This is a 64 bit integer; the upper limit of which is
approximately 1.845 x 10^19.  It's gcc-specific, but involves less
overhead than float->int conversions.

BTW, I just wrote a little program to print out the maximum value of a
64 bit integer:

18446744073709551615

Pretty impressive, huh?  When computers can hold that many bytes of
information, I'm giving up.  ;)

-- 
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|      John M. Aldrich       | "If 'everybody knows' such-and-such, |
|       aka Fighteer I       | then it ain't so, by at least ten    |
|   mailto:fighteer AT cs DOT com   | thousand to one."                    |
| http://www.cs.com/fighteer |                 - Lazarus Long       |
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