[Numpy-discussion] Does float16 exist?

[Bill Baxter]

On Jan 9, 2008 8:03 AM, Charles R Harris <charlesr.harris at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Jan 8, 2008 1:58 PM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com> wrote:
> > If you're really going to try to do it, Charles, there's an
> > implementation of float16 in the OpenEXR toolkit.
> > http://www.openexr.com/
> >
> > Or more precisely it's in the files in the Half/ directory of this:
> > http://download.savannah.nongnu.org/releases/openexr/ilmbase-1.0.1.tar.gz
> >
> > I don't know if it's IEEE conformant or not (especially w.r.t. NaN's
> > and such) but it should be a good start.  The code seems to be well
> > documented.
>
> The license looks good, essentially BSD. The code is all C++, which is the
> obvious way to go for this sort of thing, and I would like to stick with it,
> but that could lead to build/compatibility problems. I think NumPy itself
> should really be in C++.  Maybe scons can help with the build.

Yeh, I was just thinking you'd rip out and C-ify the main algorithms
rather than trying to wrap it as-is.

--bb