With the constraint 'as far as I'm concerned' removed, that would be a fundamentalist viewpoint which I, for one, abhor. > I use REAL(8) (sic) precicisoneverywhere > As far as I'm concerned REAL(4) should be obsoleted The standard tries very hard not to get involved with architectures or compiler options (it barely acknowledges that such exist.) While most compilers do use that convention, I know of at least one that uses kinds 1, 2 and 3. I will also comment that the 'kind' values are not necessarily byte sizes. It is recommended that the decimal precision of default real be at least 6, and that its decimal exponent
'The decimal precision of double precision real shall be at least 10, and its decimal exponent range shall be at The only limits the standard puts on reals is: Actually, the language doesn't insist that reals be binary - IEEE has standardized a decimal floating type and such could be supported in Fortran without any changes to the language.
The Fortran standard is indeed agnostic about what size 'default real' is - there are implemenations where it is 64 bits (Cray) and there are architectures with 16-bit reals. This is why they seem so inconsistent in style. Intel Fortran's options come from a variety of sources: The /Q prefix comes from Microsoft Fortran PowerStaton - at least indirectly.
