Hi everybody,
now that a proposal for unsigned number inclusion in Fortran has
passed the J3 hurdle, https://j3-fortran.org/doc/year/24/24-116.txt ,
I thought I would put my working hours where my mouth is and try
my hand at a testbed implementation for gfortran. I am still
grateful to Reinhold that he put this on the DIN list as a
suggestion.
I will use the text above as a preliminary spec. Of course, there
is a chance that the feature may actually not make it into F2028,
or that there would be differences, but that is what experimental
work is for.
As for my motivation, I hate having to drop to C because Fortran
lacks a feature :-)
Everything will be hidden behind a flag, tentatively called
-funsigned, to allow inclusion into the compiler at a later date.
The amount of work will be substantial, but not too difficult - mostly
copying and modifying what already works for integers
Putting the work on a public branch probably works best; I will
do so in the next few days. As name, I will use fortran_unsigned,
unless somebody has a better idea.
As to when this will be finished... I don't know, it could already
be somewhat usable before being complete. It is also work that can
be split into many relatively small parts, just implementing one
feature at a time.
Best regards
Thomas
