I think it is safe to say that whether and how much external RAM is needed very much depends on the project in question, and we all assume that the programmer is able to determine how much memory is truly necessary.

However, including more RAM than strictly necessary does not necessarily indicate a sloppy design or a bad business decision. I would go so far as to call it "thinking ahead." Few projects are static, and most customers don't want to throw out existing hardware investments to upgrade to a new version. If the current version of a program requires 2047 bytes of RAM, I personally think it'd be insane to install 2k of RAM.

Additionally, if you have 4k of RAM available and you're using 2k, but by spending a week on it you could reduce your usage to 1.5K, I don't think it makes any business sense to make that time investment. Especially if the code becomes significantly harder to read and maintain by third parties that may have to deal with it months or years from now. Or even by the same person that wrote it!

The tightest and most efficient code isn't *always* the best code.

Of course, I'll grant that sometimes every byte counts and sometimes profit margins are so tight that installing 2k instead of 4k or 16k is a very important difference. In the projects I've worked with, that hasn't been the case. But every project is different and, in the end, I think that's what we all need to recognize. Sweeping generalizations seldom can be applied to all software development projects.

In any case, I think we've veered off the original topic presented by Matt. The issue is not whether or not external RAM is necessary. Matt indicates that in his project it IS necessary, and I think we will all agree that Matt is in the best position to know that.

Craig Steiner