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