ieee floating decimal format

[dave_frank]

as the lengthy discussion in c.l.f. indicated there is interest in having decimal support. the arguments were only about whether it shud be added as a data type
(as I argued)or as a data kind.

pls bring this new ieee draft format to the attention of your developers. If intel fortran were given this feature it would create quite a CHASM between the new
intel fortran and its competitors that would be hard for them to close, PLUS would draw media attention at time of release, "Fortran finally does decimal calculations"

[Steven_L_Intel1]

Sorry, Dave. We're not interested in creating a "CHASM" by inventing a totally new language feature that has no obvious advantages to the majority of Fortran applications. If the standards committee defines and adopts such a thing, fine, we'll take a look at it. But I think that the bulk of applications interested in decimal arithmetic are those traditionally written in COBOL, which has well-defined and time-tested support for decimal arithmetic.

The "media" couldn't care less about such a thing - especially if it's Fortran.

Steve