J3/06-233r1 To: J3 From: Bill Long Subject: C16 - UTI 77 : bits storage association Date: 15-aug-2006 --------------------- Unresolved Technical Issue 77 (page 500) claims that the requirement that if BITS_KIND(X) equals BITS_KIND(Y) then the storage used for X and Y is the same leads to rampant nonportability and various other problems. Reply: The intent is to assure that a bits object is padded in memory in the same way as an integer with the same bit_size or bits_kind (which have equal values for integer or bits arguments assuming the edits for Issue 61, paper 06-223). This is essentially a requirement on the storage size for bits objects of a particular, small set of kind values. The objection raised relates to the involvement of other types, forcing possible relationships between non-default reals and non-default integers, for example. It would appear that this can be avoided by replacing BITS_KIND with BIT_SIZE as the later has a far more restricted set of argument types. Edit: ----- [500:7-8] Replace "Two objects" with "Two nonpointer, nonallocatable scalar objects" and replace "BITS_KIND" with "BIT_SIZE".