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

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.

-- glen
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