[Olivier Langlois] > ... > I have kept thinking about the original problem and I now believe that > the only solution if he wants to store 3.6GB of data in a Python script > is to recompile Python in 64 bits. I do not know if this is something > that someone has already done successfully...
I did the first port of Python to a 64-bit machine in 1993, and there may well not exist any 64-bit machine today on which Python doesn't run (for example, you can download a Python 2.4.3 Win64-Itanium installer from the main 2.4.3 download page). However, Python 2.4 still has lots of 32-bit limits internally. A massive effort is being made for Python 2.5 to relax those limitations, as explained in PEP 353: http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0353/ Of course those still won't do you any good if the OS limits the process user address space to 32 (or, far more likely, 31) bits. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list