"Walter Bright" wrote in message news:[email protected]...
Per the D spec, 'real' will be the longest type supported by the native hardware.
So if you were targeting a processor with only soft-float real would be undefined? Fixing the widths of the integers was a great idea, and we really should have done the same with the floating point types. We could easily have a library alias for what real currently means.
Not only that, a marquee feature of D is interoperability with C. We'd need an AWFULLY good reason to throw that under the bus.
Unfortunately it's a useless definition for portable interop with C++. real needs to always match the size and mangling of long double unless you want to stick workarounds all over the bindings. We have related problems with char/char/char and long/longlong/size_t, but luckily relatively few interfaces actually use long double.
