[Bug fortran/22629] Would like to access "long double" equivalent type as real*16

[tobias dot burnus at physik dot fu-berlin dot de]

------- Comment #6 from tobias dot burnus at physik dot fu-berlin dot de  2006-05-24 22:11 -------
> Gfortran will never support a real*16 data type on IA32 hardware.
> This would require software emulation of all of basic floating-point
> arthimetic

This is what Intel's Fortran Compiler does - it emulates quads in software on
IA32/EM64T/Itanium. Steve Lionel mentions another possibilty:
"IBM has an odd implementation where they use two doubles with offset
exponents. It's fast but it isn't a uniform type and doesn't give you extended
range, so it's useless for a lot of what people use higher precision types
for."
See
http://softwareforums.intel.com/ids/board/message?board.id=5&message.id=17632

g95, NAGWare f95, Pathscale and Portland's pgf95 all fail to compile real(16)
[most of them use GCC as backend, though] on AMD64.


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http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22629