Re: Declaration to get 8-bit (or 16-bit) integer?

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

Richard E Maine <nospam@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
"Original intent"? You think that there has ever been any intent,
original or otherwise, to specify specific word sizes in any version of
the Fortran language? Apparently all the convoluted wording that goes
out of its way to express things without reference to specific sizes
must have just been an accident? The intent was to write things more
simply, but people just forgot to?

As original as it gets, for the 704 they did sign magnitude
16 bit integer arithmetic in 36 bit words. Characters were
six bits each. Bytes and 8 bit character sets hadn't been
invented yet. The card reader read cards a row at a time
into two 36 bit words, such that only 72 columns were read.

That is as close to original intent as I could come up with.

That, however, sounds like a particular implementation - not "the
Fortran language". Those are two completely different subjects. You see
any hint of evidence that the intent of "the Fortran language" was to be
designed around that machine (or any other particular machine)? I don't.
I see rather strong evidence to the contrary.

--
Richard Maine | Good judgement comes from experience;
email: last name at domain . net | experience comes from bad judgement.
domain: summertriangle | -- Mark Twain
.

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