[issue11734] Add half-float (16-bit) support to struct module

[Mark Wiebe]

Mark Wiebe <mwwiebe at gmail.com> added the comment:

The patch currently assumes IEEE 754 with byte-order matching the integer type. I see that pyconfig.h defines three possible cases when IEEE 754 doubles are supported, DOUBLE_IS_LITTLE_ENDIAN_IEEE754, DOUBLE_IS_BIG_ENDIAN_IEEE754, and DOUBLE_IS_ARM_MIXED_ENDIAN_IEEE754. The code should have some byte swapping to match it to the integer endianness.

If support for non-IEEE systems is still desired, implementing a conversion using isnan/isinf/frexp/ldexp should be pretty easy, though off hand I can't see an efficient way to extract the significand bits.

Regarding the PY_LONG_LONG, it should have been unsigned PY_LONG_LONG. Using PY_UINT64_T is better, though, since a bigger PY_LONG_LONG would cause trouble in the union.

For the UINT32, maybe just using the double/PY_UINT64_T versions is better, since there is no macro for FLOAT_IS_IEEE754? Falling back to a frexpr implementation if double isn't IEEE or there is no 64-bit integer type may be a reasonable tradeoff to support the few platforms where that's the case, and 2 instead of 3 separate conversion codes is a bit better maintenance-wise.

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<http://bugs.python.org/issue11734>
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