------- Comment #3 from schnetter at aei dot mpg dot de 2005-12-15 19:39 ------- I was not suggesting to introduce a new datatype for real*16, but that the same type that is used for long double in C is available as real*16 in Fortran, if the option -m128bit-long-double is used. This request is not outlandish --- there are other compilers that support IEEE's 10 byte type as real*16, introducing 6 bytes of padding. This aligns the data with the cache lines and can increase performance.
It is customary in FORTRAN 77 to name data types after the number of bytes that they use. While it is not necessary that GFortran follows this convention, it would simplify porting FORTRAN 77 applications to GFortran, and I would like to see that feature. -- http://gcc.gnu.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=22629