If you're really going to try to do it, Charles, there's an implementation of float16 in the OpenEXR toolkit. http://www.openexr.com/
Or more precisely it's in the files in the Half/ directory of this: http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/openexr/ilmbase-1.0.1.tar.gz I don't know if it's IEEE conformant or not (especially w.r.t. NaN's and such) but it should be a good start. The code seems to be well documented. --bb On Jan 9, 2008 5:24 AM, Charles R Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On Jan 8, 2008 1:09 PM, Anne Archibald <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > On 08/01/2008, Charles R Harris <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > > > > > Well, at a minimum people will want to read, write, print, and promote > them. > > > That would at least let people work with the numbers, and since my > > > understanding is that the main virtue of the format is compactness for > > > storage and communication, a basic need will be filled right there. One > > > potential problem I see is handling +/-inf and nans, tests for these > should > > > probably be built into the type. > > > > The el-cheapo solution to this simply provides two functions: take an > > int16 array (which actually contains float16) and produce a float32 > > array, and vice versa. Then people do all their work in float32 (or > > float64 is float32 doesn't have inf/nan, I don't remember) but can > > read and write float16. > > > > Sure, but where's the fun in that? Besides, I think that adding a data type > might be an opportunity to generate a detailed road map for future projects > that might actually matter (quads and decimal floats for money stuff), and > might provide a chance to revisit some code and see if it can be simplified. > It's tough to get up the motivation to do that without some other prod. > Besides, it's new and I have a weakness for new stuff. > > > > > > Of course it would be nicer to use flaot16 natively, more or less, but > > without all the math that's going to be a frustrating experience. > > I would plan on at least arithmetic. Adding special functions probably ain't > worth it and even now a lot of things are done by promoting things to floats > or doubles and calling routines in LAPACK. > > Chuck > > > > _______________________________________________ > Numpy-discussion mailing list > Numpy-discussion@scipy.org > http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion > > _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
