FITS long integer support (was Re: [fitsbits] ADASS FITS BoF on Sunday)

[William Pence]

To clarify a couple of the previous comments in this thread which may have 
given the impression that providing FITS support for long integers is 
dependent on upgrading 32-bit hardware to 64-bit CPUs, this is generally not 
the case.  Nearly all current C/C++ compilers provide native support for 
64-bit integers even on 32-bit machines.  Java also has native support for 
64-bit integers on all platforms.

I'm less clear about long integer support in Fortran.  Fortran 90/95 I 
believe does support this, but I don't recall seeing support for integer*8 
in Fortran 77 (it is certainly not part of ANSI standard Fortran-77).  So 
this may boil down to a language divide: C/C++, Java, Fortran-90, and 
probably most other new languages naturally support long integers, but 
Fortran-77 doesn't.

Bill
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____________________________________________________________________
Dr. William Pence                          William.D.Pence at nasa.gov
NASA/GSFC Code 662         HEASARC         +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771                         +1-301-286-1684 (fax)