[XeTeX] Hyphenation of strings of more than 63 characters

[Peter Mukunda Pasedach]

Dear XeTeX list,

I am dealing with a collection of texts in Sanskrit, for which the
builtin limitation of TeX to not perform hyphenation after the 63rd
character of a string is imposing a serious limitation, as such
strings do occur. One reason for this is that one can freely form very
long compounds, another one is sandhi, in which due to euphonic
changes ending and beginning vowels fuse, another one that in Indic
scripts if one word ends in a consonant and the next one starts with a
vowel they are written together, another reason can be that scribes
simply do not use spaces consistently. Thus in the collection of texts
that I'm working on, currently comprising of 37 files, strings of more
than 63 characters occur 1823 times.

Is this limitation of 63 characters just an odd remnant of the time
TeX was written in, then necessary because of hardware limitations, or
does it still make sense? Is there a reasonable way to remove it, or
set it significantly higher?

Regards

Peter