Re: g77s lack of context sensitive constants

[craig at jcb-sc dot com]

>In particular much of my code assumes that if sigle precision constants
>are promoted to double the decimal is extended, rather than the binary.
>g77 makes a point of extending by padding with binary zeros, as this is
>what is done in any case with constants declared as a parameters. While
>this is very good, it leavs me with a huge job to fix my code.

Understood.

>I've added a warning to my g77 in case a real constant is promoted to
>double - so I at least know when this happens. From my limited knowledge
>of the compiler I know that it there is no way I could add context
>sensitive behaviour without spending a lot of time working out how to do
>it!

That's indeed the case...the same goes for me, and I wrote the $%##$ thing!

>My question is has anybody else had to address this, and is it likely that
>context sensitive constants will ever be added as an option to g77?

It's quite likely they will, as an option (probably not the default),
as part of, or shortly after, the long-awaited 0.6 rewrite.

Too much code depends on this feature, which, in some circles, at
least, is called "widest-need evaluation".

I think the g77 docs discuss this further, in case you're interested,
but you seem to understand the issues well enough already.

        tq vm, (burley)