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5.2 Miscellaneous Types

b type-information ; bytes

Pascal space type. This is documented by IBM; what does it mean?

This use of the ‘b’ type descriptor can be distinguished from its use for builtin integral types (see Defining Builtin Types Using Builtin Type Descriptors) because the character following the type descriptor is always a digit, ‘(’, or ‘-’.

B type-information

A volatile-qualified version of type-information. This is a Sun extension. References and stores to a variable with a volatile-qualified type must not be optimized or cached; they must occur as the user specifies them.

d type-information

File of type type-information. As far as I know this is only used by Pascal.

k type-information

A const-qualified version of type-information. This is a Sun extension. A variable with a const-qualified type cannot be modified.

M type-information ; length

Multiple instance type. The type seems to composed of length repetitions of type-information, for example character*3 is represented by ‘M-2;3’, where ‘-2’ is a reference to a character type (see Negative Type Numbers). I’m not sure how this differs from an array. This appears to be a Fortran feature. length is a bound, like those in range types; see Subrange Types.

S type-information

Pascal set type. type-information must be a small type such as an enumeration or a subrange, and the type is a bitmask whose length is specified by the number of elements in type-information.

In CHILL, if it is a bitstring instead of a set, also use the ‘S’ type attribute (see The String Field).

* type-information

Pointer to type-information.