Re: canonical external representation of Fortran 90 datatypes

Eric Salo (salo@mrjones.engr.sgi.com)
Wed, 19 Mar 1997 02:54:19 -0800

> It should look into the future and on 64bit systems real will be used with 8
> bytes.

Well, except for this annoying little problem called backward compatibility. On
our machines, REAL means 32 bits and I don't expect that to change for a *very*
long time. Yes, 64-bit values are the future (and even the present) but I claim
that they will rarely be called REAL; they will be REAL*8, or REAL(kind=8), or
DOUBLE PRECISION. But not REAL.

-- 
Eric Salo    Silicon Graphics Inc.    salo@sgi.com