Re: Is there a way in Fortran to designate an integer value as integer*8 ?

Thomas Koenig wrote:

R Daneel Olivaw <Danny@hyperspace.vogon.gov> schrieb:
 

Equivalences are an effective way of building data structures, you can
do that with Common as well but sometimes equivalence is more suitable.

 Can you give an example? I have a hard time imagining what it would
be useful for.
 

      integer record (100), reckey, reccod
c or integer*4
      character*40 recnam, recstr, rectwn
c
      equivalence (record, reckey), (record (2), recnam)
      equivalence (record (12), recstr), (record (22), rectwn)
      equivalence (record (32), reccod)
c               and so on
I have used constructs like that to handle database structures, although obviously we were restricted to whole-word fields and multiple-word fields - with everything being on word boundaries.
One Fortran implementation I used for years allowed us to use statement functions to implement partial-word fields, these functions could be used on the left or the right sides of an assignment.
That permitted far more fine tuning.