half and quad

[Bill Baxter]

Anders F Björklund wrote:
> Olifant wrote:
> 
>> The keyword "cent" is reserved for 128-bit integers. Could "half" and 
>> "quad" be reserved for respectively 16-bit and 128-bit floating point 
>> numbers?
> 
> I don't think there is any hope for quad or cent, until they're
> implemented on standard processors... (i.e ones that run Windows)
> 
> But I do have a port of "half" (from OpenEXR) kicking around here
> somewhere, it's basically using ushort and converts over to float.
> 
> See http://www.digitalmars.com/d/archives/digitalmars/D/31899.html

I wonder if 'half' is really worth it though.  It seems like more of a 
temporary stop-gap measure to deal with memory and throughput problems 
on a GPU.  In 5 years maybe people will look at 'half' and laugh about 
how primitive the architectures were back in the 00's.  Also since D 
isn't going to run on a GPU any time soon, and CPUs aren't going to 
implement 'half' any time soon (AFAIK), maybe this doesn't make too much 
sense.

'quad' on the other hand, seems at least as likely to have a future as 
'cent' does, so seems reasonable to reserve it to me.

--bb