Re: weird limits

[Alan Horkan <horkana maths tcd ie>]

On Thu, 1 Jul 2004, Jody Goldberg wrote:

> Date: Thu, 1 Jul 2004 12:10:00 -0400
> From: Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>
> To: Igor Rivin <rivin math temple edu>
> Cc: gnumeric-list gnome org
> Subject: Re: weird limits
>
> On Tue, Jun 29, 2004 at 03:09:41PM -0400, Igor Rivin wrote:
> > I note that gnumeric has kept the wonderful Excel feature of allowing
> > at most 65535 rows in the data. Is this realy true? Is there any way to
> > get around this?
>
> The default build uses those limits for XL compatibility.  Changing
> them is simple, but requires a recompilation.

If you'll forgive my pondering would it be very difficult to make this a
runtime option that did not require a recompile?  I assume there must be
some downsides I am unaware of or someone would have already done
it (aside from the usual downsides of lack of time and resources)?
Obviously there would be data loss if users tried to export to a file
format that didn't support that many columns but that would just require
an additional error message or two.

- Alan H.