+1 for "grain of salt"
On Saturday, July 25, 2015 at 9:11:54 AM UTC-4, Job van der Zwan wrote: > > 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? >
