  The terse quadword language syntax dept 
 The Question is:
 
How do I assign a value of --1 to a quadword?
 
 The Answer is:
 
  A language statement syntax question depends entirely upon the target
  language.
 
  The OpenVMS Wizard will guess this is the Compaq C or C++ environment
  on OpenVMS Alpha, and would accordingly recommend looking at the __int64
  datatype and at the Compaq C or Compaq C++ language documentation.
 
  For languages that lack quadword, octaword, or higher-precision operators,
  various extended-precision arithmetic calls exist in the OpenVMS run-time
  library documentation.  And then there is always Knuth...
 
