To clarify a couple of the previous comments in this thread which may have
given the impression that providing FITS support for long integers is
dependent on upgrading 32-bit hardware to 64-bit CPUs, this is generally not
the case. Nearly all current C/C++ compilers provide native support for
64-bit integers even on 32-bit machines. Java also has native support for
64-bit integers on all platforms.

I'm less clear about long integer support in Fortran. Fortran 90/95 I
believe does support this, but I don't recall seeing support for integer*8
in Fortran 77 (it is certainly not part of ANSI standard Fortran-77). So
this may boil down to a language divide: C/C++, Java, Fortran-90, and
probably most other new languages naturally support long integers, but
Fortran-77 doesn't.

Bill
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__________________________________________________ __________________
Dr. William Pence
NASA/GSFC Code 662 HEASARC +1-301-286-4599 (voice)
Greenbelt MD 20771 +1-301-286-1684 (fax)