[Info-vax] Large mailboxes - RMS Indexed file internal design

[Craig A. Berry]

On 12/5/20 3:31 PM, Stephen Hoffman wrote:
> On 2020-12-05 18:08:22 +0000, Hein RMS van den Heuvel said:
> 
>> Interestingly (to some) it could readily grow to 4 bytes as there is 
>> an adjacent unnamed fill word to allow for aligned quad-word moves.
> 
> An investment in migrating RMS indexed files from a word to a longword 
> seems unlikely to substantially postpone our reaching the limitations of 
> the current design.

Maybe I'm missing something, but moving from 16-bit IDs to 32-bit IDs in
the RFA would give you 4,294,967,295 records per VBN instead of 65,535
records per VBN, right? So the total number of records in a file that
one could reference via RFA could be 4,294,967,295 * 4,294,967,295?
That's a lot.  It seems to me that that does move things substantially
beyond "the limitations of the current design" as far as maximum record
count goes, which is what we were discussing.