[Python-ideas] Adding a half-float (16-bit) type to PEP 3118 (and possibly the struct module?)

Eli Stevens (Gmail) wickedgrey at gmail.com
Thu Mar 31 01:34:29 CEST 2011


On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 3:03 PM, Raymond Hettinger
<raymond.hettinger at gmail.com> wrote:
> I would support adding float16 to the struct module.
> It's a well defined format so we might as well provide an accessor.
> Just open a feature request for it.

This seems like a simple solution, however:

On Wed, Mar 30, 2011 at 1:24 PM, Terry Reedy <tjreedy at udel.edu> wrote:
> If this were added to the PEP, it would be included in
> http://bugs.python.org/issue3132

I'm still working through the issue/patch, but it seems to be
concerned with how to handle long (long?) doubles cleanly on various
platforms with varying levels of support for it (at least, that's the
impression I got; I'm still a little unclear about what exactly was
deficient prior to the patch).  That seems like it would be a separate
issue to me; can you explain in more detail how they're related?  Is
just that the new work should be based on the source post patch?

Also, am I correct in my understanding that any code changes to
_struct.c, etc. would not show up in a production release before 3.3?
I'm based out of a strictly 2.7 shop, so if I'm going to need to
develop patches, I'll have to make sure I have some place to test
things (for our purposes, we just need a spec that numpy and cython
can standardize on, but if a patch to the struct module is what it's
going to take to make that happen, I'll give it a shot :).

Eli



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