Re: [fortran,patch] Complete front-end support for __float128

[Tobias Burnus <burnus at net-b dot de>]

 On 08/26/2010 05:00 PM, FX wrote:
> > Why do you need a flag at all?  Simply support real(kind=16).
> Some people have codes, in standard Fortran, that autodetect the floating-point mode with the largest precision and use that. If we introduce soft-float modes, they might be annoyed as everything slows down immensely... and they have no way to detect "the most precise hardware-supported floating-point type".
> [...]
> On the other hand, I suppose that most people actually hardcode kind numbers rather than use carefully crafted selected_real_kind calls, so it may not be such a big deal.

My impression is that 99% of the codes use REAL, REAL(4), REAL(8), 
DOUBLE PRECISION, sp=kind(0.0), dp=kind(0.0d0) - thus for those, it does 
not matter. If one uses REAL(16) unconditionally, one would currently 
get an error (invalid kind); with the patch one would get a linkage 
error. If one uses selected_real_kind with numbers allowing for kind=10, 
it also returns them instead of kind=16 - thus those programs still 
should work.

Thus, I am fine with enabling them without a flag - but a flag is also 
fine with me.

Tobias