"John.Cowan" <xxxxxx@reutershealth.com> writes:

> bear scripsit:
>
>> As for strings, pfah.  If you work in corpus linguistics it's not
>> too uncommon to have literally millions of characters in a string.
>> I'd really hate to see strings limited to 1023 characters.
>
> Can you live with 2^24?

No.  Have you heard of sparse arrays?  They need indices too.

Thomas