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.

indeed, there is no official support, since integer*8 isn't in the standard.
However, both the intel and gnu compiler support it, and I abuse this feature
(with caution). I also recall the Cray compiler used to have a flag to the
compiler that made floats become double's essentially, so something in this
direction may be implemented by compiler writers.

- peter