Will Eiffel ever support files bigger than 2 GB?  We have been working
around this issue for the last 10 years by maintaining our own set of
large file classes.  We copied FILE, PLAIN_TEXT_FILE, RAW_FILE, DIRECTORY and
UNIX_FILE_INFO and all of their ancestor classes into files named
LARGE_FILE, etc.  We then changed every INTEGER that might need to be
large to INTEGER_64 and also changed a few references to FILE* classes to
their LARGE_FILE* counterparts.  We also had to copy part of file.c and
create "large" routines with new names starting with "large_" to support
large files.

This works but has several disadvantages:

1. Every time we get a new release, I have to manually compare all of the
   classes to pick up any changes, including comparison of the C code.
   This is particularly painful because I have to be careful to keep
   code that is intentionally different, so that it works correctly for
   large files.  It is also quite time consuming and error-prone.

2. There is of course no inheritance relationship between the FILE* classes
   and the LARGE_FILE* classes (or between the ancestors of each).

3. We have to use LARGE_FILE, etc everywhere, instead of FILE.

Are we ever going to get large file support?  Even using 64-bit applications
does not solve the problem because the type of features like `count'
is INTEGER_32 instead of INTEGER_64.