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Because we have made the first stage of our processing flexible with
respect to how a corpus extends across multiple files, in general, {two}
numbers will uniquely identify each of your documents: its file number
and document number within that file. For that reason, and because each
posting must retain a unique identifier for each document, it becomes
important to construct a single number that folds them together.
Maintaining a single integer, instead of two integers, therefore becomes
a worthwhile space saving.
One simple way to accomplish this is to
multiply the document's file number by some number larger than the
maximum number of documents within any file, then add its document
number. Just how large a number this must be, whether your
machine/compiler efficiently supports integers this large (or whether
you are better off keeping the two numbers separate) will vary
considerably. For this reason it makes good sense to isolate these
issues in a separate routine.
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