Documentation of gfortran.

[Toon Moene]

Folks,

I want to tackle the documentation of gfortran the coming weekend. 
Joseph, if you have some insight to offer on the current status of this 
documentation and ways to improve it (over and above just correcting it 
for spelling, grammar and documentation convention errors) I would be 
glad to hear it.

The command line options -i8, -r8 and -d8 currently don't work - I'll 
make a note of that in the documentation along with a pointer to the PR 
that documents this.

However, we might want to think again about what -d8 means for gfortran. 
  In fact, among other compilers the meaning is divided into two, 
mutually incompatible, ways:

1. -d8 means the same as -i8 -r8 (to ensure the Standard behaviour that
    a default integer is the same size as a default real).

2. On compilers that support 128-bit floating point numbers, -d8 often
    means: If -r8 is specified, do *not* promote DOUBLE PRECISION to
    128-bit floating point.  This is useful on processors on which
    128-bit floating point arithmetic is expensive, and there are only
    a few DOUBLE PRECISION variables in the code.

Note that neither of the three options works, at the moment, so we can 
just document what we want (and put a note in that it doesn't work at 
the moment).

My preference is for option 2.

Please, comment.

Thanks,

-- 
Toon Moene - e-mail: toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl - phone: +31 346 214290
Saturnushof 14, 3738 XG  Maartensdijk, The Netherlands
Maintainer, GNU Fortran 77: http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/g77_news.html
A maintainer of GNU Fortran 95: http://gcc.gnu.org/fortran/