(no subject)

[rob]

sam's biggest engineering mistake is the passing
of pointers across the connection.  it worsens the
problem by assuming a pointer fits in a 4-byte
word.   it's easy to fix, though, if you're willing
to change the protocol to pass longer values for
longs.  see the routines in mesg.c on both sides
with names like inlong() and so on.  you can do
this in a way that will remain compatible among
all your local machines but you will become
incompatible with external machines.

i'm pretty sure this is the major problem with the
alpha.  a variant of the problem occurred on the
cray long ago.

you also might need to change the structures Block and
List or else change the Block management not to use
the List routines.

-rob