CompuServe Messages

I probably don't understand this as well as I should, but I can declare an array of virtually any size in Basic limited only be available memory. I believe the same is true in C. I'm trying to envisage the programming problem when I'm trying to invert a large matrix in a stat program where I need three large arrays. In Basic the solution is relatively simple to do, but I get the idea that in Modula it becomes a quite complex chore, relatively speaking. Although I've never tried this in C, it seems to me that I recall that even in C one can declare an array of almost any size within constraints of memory. Not being a Modula programmer, I guess I may be seeing more in this problem than there is, but why would any language need to impose such constraints especially for a target machine which has large memory capacity. In my old CP/M machine it was understandable because typical systems rarely had more than 32k of available memory. I can see the problem on MSDOS machines because of the 64k page limitations of the processor, but even there most compilers provide for a large code and data area to overcome the limitation. I'm trying to understand this and maybe I just don't see the forest for the trees, so I appreciate any insights. I'd like to learn Modula because it seems a bit less cryptic than C and yet possesses all the programming power of C on the Amiga. I'm not being critical, here, but simply trying to understand.