From: tkoenig@netcologne.de   
      
   John Levine  schrieb:   
   > It appears that Thomas Koenig   said:   
   >>Anton Ertl  schrieb:   
   >>> Thomas Koenig  writes:   
   >>>>The Cray-1 had double precision numbers, with software support   
   >>>>only.  They had to in order to conform to the FORTRAN standards   
   >>>>of storage association.   
   >>>   
   >>> And my guess is that the word order for double-precision is also   
   >>> specified by FORTRAN.   
   >>   
   >>Your guess is wrong.   
   >>   
   >>If you have storage association (via COMMON/EQUIVALENCE)   
   >>between two variables of different type and assign a value   
   >>to one of them, the other one becomes undefined.   
   >   
   > There was never any sort of type punning in FORTRAN.   
      
   [Interesting history snipped]   
      
   > Fortran ran on many Different machines with different floating point   
   > formats and you could not make any assumptions about similarities in   
   > single and double float formats.   
      
   Unfortunately, this did not keep people from using a feature   
   that was officially prohibited by the standard, see for example   
   https://netlib.org/slatec/src/d1mach.f . This file fulfilled a   
   clear need (having certain floating point constants available for   
   the multitude of different floating point constants in the wild)   
   but it had to resort to type punning.  It is also interesting   
   for the wild multitude of different floating point formats for   
   double precision that were relevant in the past.   
      
   Fortunately, these days it's all IEEE; I think nobody uses IBM's   
   base-16 FP numbers for anything serious any more.   
      
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