"Turns out that I could store about 1200 quakes per square with the 700+ MB I have. Not enough. It would work if I could have variable length arrays."

Ah-HA! XB wins again!!! :) Sorry, couldn't resist.

But, in XB one is limited to 8 dimensions of whatever size the system resources have - physical ram and swap file. Also depends on the data type (1 to 8 bytes, more if string)

And, the arrays are dynamic. It only uses memory for those elements that are used. Empty array? Only the minimal pointer table overhead. In fact, that's the way arrays are handles in XB, as a table of pointers.

Remember my stalled project on JOB? That program loads six entire catalogs into memory.

Damn...I need to find some time to do more programming. I miss it...

Brian