What do you find interesting about them? I haven’t spent more than a few hours reading about them (and the definition of “unum” seems to be a moving target, so I’m not sure that it would have been useful to study them further), but my rough thoughts are:
- SORN are a cute alternative to intervals, but only feasible with *extremely* low precision formats. - For very low precision needs, fixed point or indexed numbers or lossy compression seem like better options for most cases. - For “typical” precision and dynamic range needs, hardware floating-point (possibly with a compressed storage format) is just as useful and orders of magnitude faster. - For limited dynamic range applications, fixed-point formats seem like a much better option (there’s a good opportunity here for library work to make using fixed-point arithmetic less error prone). - For very high dynamic range applications, fixed-point logarithms or level-index numbers seem like a better option. Unums are a cute way to mostly unify these ideas into a single type, but that doesn’t actually seem like a good idea to me. This is very much going to be a jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none situation. That said, they are an *interesting* idea, so I wouldn’t discourage anyone from investigating them. – Steve > On May 7, 2016, at 3:08 PM, Matthew Johnson via swift-evolution > <[email protected]> wrote: > > Unums sound very interesting > (http://ubiquity.acm.org/article.cfm?id=2913029). I'm wondering if anyone > working on numerics in Swift has considered an implementation in the standard > library. > > Matthew > > Sent from my iPad > _______________________________________________ > swift-evolution mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution _______________________________________________ swift-evolution mailing list [email protected] https://lists.swift.org/mailman/listinfo/swift-evolution
