Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Tue, 25 Feb 2025 15:47:15 -0700, Peter Flass wrote:

The idea of defining different-sized bytes is a real plus.

What they meant by “bytes” was really just “bitfields”.

With the move to 64-bit addressing, I’ve often felt that it was a missed
opportunity to reserve the bottom 3 bits for a bit offset within a byte.
That way, you could have arbitrary bitfield addressing available, without
any change to the pointer format. Of course it would only be available in
a select few instructions (e.g. “load bitfield”, “store bitfield”); other
memory-referencing instructions would either ignore those bottom 3 bits or
insist they be zero.