Haven’t we all been using 64-bit machines for years now?
I guess that’s one of the questions, how many boxes out there still don’t know about AG, AGR & co ?
Did you really every miss it (I haven’t, so far, to be honest).
Why not add an ER for this ?
Oh yes, and it’s more a “Natural general” type questions, most platforms are 64-bit nowadays 
And while we’re at it, allow for unsigned (Ix) fields - perhaps (UIx) or (Jx).
B-type Fields can be used as some kind of unsigned integer fields. But arithmetic statements are not allowed - sometimes.
But for example this works:
define data local
01 #i4 (I4)
01 #b4 (B4)
end-define
#i4 := 255
#b4 := #i4
display #i4 #b4
add 1 to #i4
if #i4 > #b4
write ‘greater’
end-if
end
I can’t imagine there are very many.
That’s what prompted my original post; the program I was working on would have been more elegant if I’d had (I8) fields to work with. But I did work around it.
I’ll think about it.
I should probably admit that it was an odd program to be writing in Natural. It would have been even more elegant if Natural provided access to bit-level operations like shifts and bitwise and, or, and xor. As it was, I had to call assembler routines for significant parts of the operation.