[pdftex] Hyphenating Cyrillic text.

[Ville Voipio]

> if you've got the physical memory to support it, fine.  force your
> system to swap, and you'll be whinging about the feeble behaviour of
> tex.

The discussion about TeX memory requirements has been very interesting,
indeed. However, I wonder what the real memory requirement is? Of course,
dynamic memory allocation would me more economic from the memory point of
view, but is memory really a problem today? I guess many computers would
allow the "add one zero" approach without sacrificing usability.

A modern PC has 256 MiB of memory, and another 256 MiB costs around 40 E (or
$40). If we compare this to the situation during the days TeX was born, the
difference is vast. Still, the jobs have not grown exponentially, i.e., a
book is still approximately the same size it was twenty years ago.

Dynamic memory allocation would be nice in mainframe environment, where a
plethora of users struggle over the resources. But in PC environment I do
not see much difference, there ought to be enough memory for most things,
anyway. So, I would not put dynamization of TeX memory allocation at a very
high position on my wishlist.

Due to the exponential growth of computer memory size, there is no problem
if the memory requirements of a program stay approximately the same. It
would even be enough if the exponential groth rate of memory requirements
were below that of the memory capacity. Most programs require more and more
memory, and I would not say TeX needs a lot. Just have a look at Microsoft
Office or StarOffice memory consumption...

- Ville