Re: Is it time to legitimise REAL*8 etc?

GaryScott wrote:
....
Please choose. Is the radix to be 2 or 10?
(Or do you mean that a *new* real*<something-else>
is to reflect the radix? BTW, Yuk!) What older programs
are being supported now?

integer, radix=<2-36>, rangemin=<value>, rangemax=<value>, lsb=<value>
bitsize=<value>...

I want to be able to specify lots of attributes and have them done in
software if I define something non-native. Let the simple kind system
live on, but I have more challenging requirements.

What you want is a derived type with all those things as type
parameters. Attributes are things that are independent of base
type. So, unless your claiming that RADIX is a property of
LOGICAL or CHARACTER, I don't see how RADIX (or any of
the other things above) can be attributes.

In fact, it's not clear that a derived type with all those properties
couldn't already be written in Fortran 2003. The problem is that
they decided to limit non-KIND type parameters to only be lengths.
There was no reason for that decision that I could discover.

--
J. Giles

"I conclude that there are two ways of constructing a software
design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously
no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated
that there are no obvious deficiencies." -- C. A. R. Hoare

"Simplicity is prerequisite for reliability" -- E. W. Dijkstra


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