long long long

[Geoff Keating]

Tim Josling <tej@melbpc.org.au> writes:

> My COBOL compiler will need a 128 bit data type to support 31
> digit decimal arithmetic which is required in the new cobol
> standard. A couple of questions: is it technically feasible to
> support this in GCC, similar to the way long long (64 bit) is
> supported?

Yes; in fact, on some 64-bit ports there's partial support for it
already.

It would be a TImode value.

> Does it require that you have enough registers to hold
> a whole value in storage?

Yes.  That's a limitation of the way gcc 

> In principle could a patch to support long long long be
> acceptable?

Yes, but not if you call it 'long long long'.  Call it something like
__TImode__ in the C compiler (if you even allow it to be used from the
C compiler, although this is a good idea for test cases if nothing else).

-- 
- Geoffrey Keating <geoffk@cygnus.com>