Sent from my iPad
> On May 9, 2016, at 10:44 AM, Stephen Canon <[email protected]> wrote: > > What do you find interesting about them? As an app developer I'm not even remotely a numerics expert so my understanding is probably superficial. The link I posted gave me the impression that they would avoid the errors that accumulate in floating point arithmetic. > > 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. Makes sense. Thanks for sharing your thoughts! > > 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
