On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:55 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hi, > > On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:45 AM, Mark Wiebe <mwwi...@gmail.com> wrote: > > On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:42 AM, Matthew Brett <matthew.br...@gmail.com > > > > wrote: > >> > >> Hi, > >> > >> On Thu, Feb 23, 2012 at 10:11 AM, Pierre Haessig > >> <pierre.haes...@crans.org> wrote: > >> > Le 23/02/2012 17:28, Charles R Harris a écrit : > >> >> That's correct. They are both extended precision (80 bits), but > >> >> aligned on 32bit/64bit boundaries respectively. Sun provides a true > >> >> quad precision, also called float128, while on PPC long double is an > >> >> odd combination of two doubles. > >> > This is insane ! ;-) > >> > >> I don't know if it's insane, but it is certainly very confusing, as > >> this thread the previous one show. > >> > >> The question is, what would be less confusing? > > > > > > One approach would be to never alias longdouble as float###. Especially > > float128 seems to imply that it's the IEEE standard binary128 float, > which > > it is on some platforms, but not on most. > > It's virtually never IEEE binary128. Yarik Halchenko found a real one > on an s/360 running Debian. Some docs seem to suggest there are Sun > machines out there with binary128, as Chuck said. So the vast > majority of numpy users with float128 have Intel 80-bit, and some have > PPC twin-float. > > Do we all agree then that 'float128' is a bad name? > > In the last thread, I had the feeling there was some consensus on > renaming Intel 80s to: > > float128 -> float80_128 > float96 -> float80_96 > > For those platforms implementing it, maybe > > float128 -> float128_ieee > > Maybe for PPC: > > float128 -> float_pair_128 > > and, personally, I still think it would be preferable, and less > confusing, to encourage use of 'longdouble' instead of the various > platform specific aliases. > +1, I think it's good for its name to correspond to the name in C/C++, so that when people search for information on it they will find the relevant information more easily. With a bunch of NumPy-specific aliases, it just creates more hassle for everybody. -Mark > What do you think? > > Best, > > Matthew > _______________________________________________ > NumPy-Discussion mailing list > NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org > http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion >
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