On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 9:46 AM, Michael Gilbert <[email protected] > wrote:
> On Wed, 8 Sep 2010 09:43:56 -0600, Charles R Harris wrote: > > On Wed, Sep 8, 2010 at 9:26 AM, Michael Gilbert < > [email protected] > > > wrote: > > > > > Hi, > > > > > > Are there any plans to add support for decimal floating point > > > arithmetic, as defined in the 2008 revision of the IEEE 754 standard > > > [0], in numpy? > > > > > > > > Not at the moment. There is currently no hardware or C support and adding > > new types to numpy isn't trivial. You can get some limited Decimal > > functionality by using python classes and object arrays, for instance the > > Decimal class in the python decimal module, but the performance isn't > great. > > > > What is your particular interest in decimal support? > > Primarily avoiding catastrophic cancellation when subtracting > large values. I was planning to use the decimal class, but was > curious whether support for the IEEE standard was coming any time soon. > > If you just need more precision, mpmath has better performance than the Decimal class. Also, it might be possible to avoid the loss of precision by changing the computation, but I don't know the details of what you are doing. Chuck
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