... snip ...
Exhaust? What does that mean?
That means at 4GHz, it takes one second to iterate over 4G items (give
or take).
That means that we can scale up our problems to larger sizes.
That means that letting something run for an hour is dangerous,
because we are likely to exhaust our index space.
A 32 bit integer can hold values
between roughly -4E9 and 4E9, to an accuracy of 1. If you want to
measure 1 nanosec. ticks since the birth of Christ, that is
probably too small. If you want to measure 1 day ticks over the
same period, it suffices.
You are also allowed to use two 32 bit integers to measure
something. You may lose something due to the difficulties of
portably detecting overflow.
Oh, joy. Actually, I have written a C++ class for that, when I need
it.
