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

[Peter Teuben]

> 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.

indeed, there is no official support, since integer*8 isn't in the standard.  
However, both the intel and gnu compiler support it, and I abuse this feature
(with caution). I also recall the Cray compiler used to have a flag to the
compiler that made floats become double's essentially, so something in this
direction may be implemented by compiler writers.

- peter