gfortran IEEE module with 80-bit and 128-bit floats

[FX]

Hi Uros,

Happy new year! I’m cc’ing the Fortran list, as others might in fact be interested to know about this status update:

> Just wanted to stop by to ask if you find the attached hooks proto-patch of any use?

In fact, I’ve learnt a couple of weeks ago that the Fortran standard committee has issued a formal interpretation following a question I had asked a while back. This interpretation (and the corresponding edits to the next version of the standard to clarify it) will make it necessary for the front-end to know of the runtime support for all types. (Including I/O and some stuff we only know at runtime).

[For the Fortran devs: the committee has clarified that it intended the IEEE transformational functions to be usable in constant expressions… thus the front-end needs to be able to simplify them.]

Accordingly, I now need to devise a mechanism to pass some info from libgfortran compilation to the front-end. I’m thinking of having a spec-like file, written during libgfortran configure, installed alongside the IEEE module files, and read by the front-end. Since this mechanism might be useful for other stuff in future, I’m trying to think of how to implement it in a relatively generic way.

Cheers,
FX