So I came across the concept of UNUMs on the Pony language mailing list <http://lists.ponylang.org/pipermail/ponydev/2015-July/000071.html> this morning. I hadn't heard of them before, and a quick search doesn't show up anything on this mailing list, so I guess most people here haven't either. They're a proposed alternate encoding for numbers by John L. Gustafson. This presentation by him sums it up nicely:
http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/03/Right-SizingPrecision1.pdf “Unums”(universal numbers) are to floating point what floating point is to > fixed point. > Floating-point values self-describe their scale factor, but fix the > exponent and fraction size. Unums self-describe the exponent size, fraction > size, and inexact state, and include fixed point and IEEE floats as special > cases. > The presentation can be seen here, provided you have the Silverlight plugin: http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/archives/right-sizing-precision-to-save-energy-power-and-storage Now, I don't know enough about this topic to say if they're a good or bad idea, but I figured the idea is interesting/relevant enough to share with the Julia crowd. I'm also wondering if they could be implemented (relatively) easily within Julia, given its flexible type system. If so, they might provide an interesting advanced example, no?
