Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!utstat!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!usc!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!uflorida!novavax!hcx1!bill From: bill@ssd.harris.com (Bill Leonard) Newsgroups: comp.lang.fortran Subject: Re: FORTRAN 8X PRECISION Message-ID: Date: 9 Nov 89 14:26:50 GMT References: <7563@xenna.Xylogics.COM> <8619@microsoft.UUCP> Sender: news@hcx1.UUCP Organization: Harris Computer Systems Division Lines: 28 In-reply-to: mccalpin@masig3.ocean.fsu.edu's message of 7 Nov 89 01:42:50 GMT > I have been talking with Gary Campbell of Sun Microsystems, and his > proposal gets to the heart of the problem. The problem with literal > constants is that the stupid compilers insist on assigning a precision > to them without looking at their context. Then the context is used > later on to decide what conversions are required to obey the > mixed-mode arithmetic rules. It would solve almost all of my problems > to simply have the constants take on the precision that they are going > to be coerced to anyway. The compiler has to know how to do this > anyway, in order to do mixed-mode arithmetic, so the added complexity > is negligible. Subroutine calls are a glaring exception to this statement. Constants passed as arguments have no context to determine their precision. Therefore, the user must supply the context. Since this occurs quite often, the syntax should be clear, concise, and easy to learn and use. The assertion that it can be ugly because it is used infrequently is plain wrong. Our customers have made similar suggestions to us, but their problems are usually related to compile-time arithmetic. If they write a constant with 12 digits in it, they would prefer the compiler not truncate it to single-precision until it absolutely must. -- Bill Leonard Harris Computer Systems Division 2101 W. Cypress Creek Road Fort Lauderdale, FL 33309 bill@ssd.csd.harris.com or hcx1!bill@uunet.uu.net