On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 3:02 PM, Mark Dickinson <dickinsm@gmail.com> wrote:
On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 7:54 PM, Alexander Belopolsky <alexander.belopolsky@gmail.com> wrote:
I would like to see a patch adding float16 to struct and ctypes modules together with the buffer support.
I'm not sure how much sense this makes for ctypes, given that float16 isn't a datatype supported by most C implementations.
"On ARM targets, GCC supports half-precision (16-bit) floating point via the __fp16 type." http://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Half_002dPrecision.html However, before ctypes can support this, half-floats' support should be added to libffi through platform specific assembly hackery. So I withdraw my suggestion that ctypes support should be a prerequisite for float16 support in the buffer protocol, but I still would like to see it in struct. BTW, what letter code is proposed for half-floats? The only unassigned letter in the word "half" is 'a'. Maybe it is time to extend struct and buffer format specification to include field bit-width?