On 10/30/2015 01:40 PM, Fred Cisin wrote:
I always assigned them a problem of writing a sort for a file/dataset too big to fit into memory. They literally refused to understand that a dataset could exist that would be too large to fit into memory. A couple of students wrote a letter to the college administration complaining about me and the department and our "out-dated" curriculum, insisting that "in the real world, the proper solution to a file too big for memory is to replace the computer with a bigger one." I was actually called on the carpet to answer the charge! That was trivially easy when I pointed out to the chancellor how much it would COST to equip the student homework computer labs with computers capable of holding a national telephone directory in memory.
How times change. Most programmers of my era, would do it the "old" way by habit--read in bits of the dataset. It took quite a bit of relearning that mapping a file into a 48-bit address space and operating on the data directly, letting the pager do the bookkeeping could render what at first started out to be a fairly complicated job, very simple.
--Chuck
