Unless I missed it, one important usage case has not been mentioned so far.
If you have an existing binary data file that you want to read in
Fortran, or want to write a binary file for another application to use
then it's necessary to specify that your variables used in the I/O lists
have a specific length in bits. INT32, REAL64 and the rest provide a
good way of specifying this which was hard to do in a portable way before.
--
Clive Page
Dept of Physics & Astronomy,
University of Leicester,
Leicester, LE1 7RH, U.K.
|