[Numpy-discussion] GSOC 2013

[Jaime Fernández del Río]

On Mon, Mar 4, 2013 at 2:29 PM, Todd <toddrjen at gmail.com> wrote:

>
> 5. Currently dtypes are limited to a set of fixed types, or combinations
> of these types.  You can't have, say, a 48 bit float or a 1-bit bool.  This
> project would be to allow users to create entirely new, non-standard dtypes
> based on simple rules, such as specifying the length of the sign, length of
> the exponent, and length of the mantissa for a custom floating-point
> number.  Hopefully this would mostly be used for reading in non-standard
> data and not used that often, but for some situations it could be useful
> for storing data too (such as large amounts of boolean data, or genetic
> code which can be stored in 2 bits and is often very large).
>

I second this general idea. Simply having a pair of packbits/unpackbits
functions that could work with 2 and 4 bit uints would make my life easier.
If it were possible to have an array of dtype 'uint4' that used half the
space of a 'uint8', but could have ufuncs an the like ran on it, it would
be pure bliss. Not that I'm complaining, but a man can dream...

Jaime

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