it's not really buying you much I strongly agree. There's a certain elegance in fixing the bug, but it has little practical significance. If you're processing

it's not really buying you much I strongly agree. There's a certain elegance in fixing the bug, but it has little practical significance. If you're processing arrays with a billion or more elements, you need to be doing that in a 64-bit environment. In fact you are in a 64 bit environment, because your data won't even fit into a 32 bit address space. End of story. Edit: just to be pedantic, and to forestall arguments, when I say "64-bit environment", that means pointers, array indexes, etc are all 64 bits. Using 32 bit ints just doesn't work.