[Numpy-discussion] Does float16 exist?

[David Cournapeau]

Charles R Harris wrote:
>
>
> On Jan 8, 2008 1:58 PM, Bill Baxter <wbaxter at gmail.com 
> <mailto: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.
Why do you think scons would help ? You can build C++ code today with 
distutils; but I am not sure it is ok to use C++ in numpy (e.g. adding a 
C++ compiler dependency). Also, note that C++ is really a mess to 
support on multi-platform because of compiler incompabilities (at the 
source and at the binary level).

cheers,

David