(j3.2006) what now, 754r? - DFP in F2008?

[Tobias Burnus]

Whitlock, Stan wrote:
> I don?t know if it makes sense to put DFP into Fortran 2008.
Given that 2008 is quite soon and that Fortran 2008 is (supposed to be)
only a minor revision, I'm not sure whether it is too early for that.
Thus I would be more in favour of putting it into a TR than to rush to
have a version for Fortran 2008; esp. it is much easier to opt out
(temporarily or permanently) if it is only in a TR - and, as TR 15581
showed, if the things in a TR are popular, many compilers will implement
it rather soon - particularly if it becomes part of Fortran 2013.

Does anyone know the status of the ISO/IEC TR 24842 draft ("Extension
for the programming language C to support decimal floating-point
arithmetic") and how many compilers support that? (I know that there is
some DFP support in GCC for (only!) PowerPC and x86-* since 4.2, but DFP
is not enabled by default and the ABI seems to be in a flux. At least
for gfortran (and g95) support for DFP will be much easier if it is
already supported by the C front end and thus by the compiler backend,
which already seems to be the case to a certain extent.)

Tobias,
who wonders how much DFP is missed by typical Fortran users; and who
does not see that he will need/use it, but acknowledges that for
transaction systems DFP are quite useful.