Early Type Systems: FORTRAN

(This is Fortran 77, but early Fortran was similar.)

• INTEGER

• INTEGER*2, INTEGER*4, INTEGER*8

• LOGICAL (Fortran jargon for ‘boolean’)

• LOGICAL*1 (synonym: BYTE), LOGICAL*2, LOGICAL*4, LOGICAL*8

• REAL

• REAL*4, REAL*8 (synonym: DOUBLE PRECISION), REAL*16

• COMPLEX

• COMPLEX*8, COMPLEX*16 (synonym: DOUBLE COMPLEX), COMPLEX*32

Now if you write:

        INTEGER I
        REAL R,S
        
        R = I + S

then the compiler can automatically generate the correct instructions

• Static type checking

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Copyright © 1999,2008 Mark Dominus