Unum II announcement

[H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d]

On Sun, Aug 14, 2016 at 09:08:31PM +0000, Nick B via Digitalmars-d wrote:
> On Wednesday, 10 August 2016 at 08:36:41 UTC, Nick B wrote:
> > On Tuesday, 9 August 2016 at 09:45:58 UTC, Nick B wrote:
> > http://www.johngustafson.net/pubs/RadicalApproach.pdf
> > 
> > Please note that Figure 8 on page 9 has errors.
> 
> Please note these errors have now been corrected, and the paper  is
> distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Non
> Commercial 3.0 License which permits non-commercial use, reproduction
> and distribution of the work without further permission provided the
> original work is properly cited."
> 
> Does anyone have any feedback on this paper ?
> 
> Does anyone feel that Unums should be part of D ?
[...]

I'm personally quite interested in a D implementation of unums as
described in the paper. However, I'm unsure if it should be part of the
official D distribution, since this is still very early and the unum
system hasn't been "proven in the field" just yet.  While I certainly
hope this research would eventually revolutionize numerical
applications, it would take a long time before it would catch on, and
until then, I think it's better to have unums available as a library
rather than introducing it into the language itself. Having it available
via dub or something like that would probably be a very good idea.

Thanks to operator overloading and alias this, we can probably do a
pretty good job implementing unums as a library so that people can try
it out.  It would also be an interesting exercise to implement unums in
D and take advantage of CTFE in ways that may give us very nice
implementational possibilities.


T

-- 
A program should be written to model the concepts of the task it performs rather than the physical world or a process because this maximizes the potential for it to be applied to tasks that are conceptually similar and, more important, to tasks that have not yet been conceived. -- Michael B. Allen