largest variable that can be created in octave?

[George Dahl]

What is the largest single variable one can create in octave?  Is the only
limitation physical RAM and address space?  I am using the latest stable
version of octave on Mac OS 10.5 and I installed it from a binary downloaded
from octave-forge.  When I try to create a large variable that should be
over 4 GB in size (but most likely well under 9 GB which is how much RAM I
have),  I get the following behavior:
octave-3.0.1:1> x = rand(1000,800,800);
error: memory exhausted or requested size too large for range of Octave's
index type -- trying to return to prompt

How can I get larger variables?

Thanks,
George
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: https://www.cae.wisc.edu/pipermail/help-octave/attachments/20080619/d9ff02cc/attachment.html