Unum II announcement

H. S. Teoh via Digitalmars-d digitalmars-d at puremagic.com
Tue Feb 23 13:47:10 PST 2016


On Tue, Feb 23, 2016 at 09:20:23PM +0000, Nick B via Digitalmars-d
wrote:
> On Tuesday, 23 February 2016 at 18:35:47 UTC, H. S. Teoh wrote:
> 
> >
> >This is very interesting, and looks more promising than the previous
> >unum presentation.
> >
> >While it's too early to hope for a hardware implementation, I'm
> >interested in implementing a software emulation in D.  D's powerful
> >templating system could let us experiment with various implementation
> >possibilities (e.g., different word sizes, variable size vs. fixed
> >sizes, etc.), to get a feel for how it would work in real-life. 
> 
> Excellent suggestion. At least one firm supporter.

I do want to clarify, though, that I think at this point implementing
unum in the D compiler is almost certainly premature. What I had in mind
was more of a unum library that early adopters can use to get a feel for
how things would work.  If the unum system turns out to have garner
enough support that it starts getting hardware support, then it should
be relatively easy to transition it into a built-in type.  I don't see
this happening for at least another 5-10, though.  It took at least as
long (probably longer) for hardware manufacturers to adopt the IEEE
standard, and right now unums aren't even standardized yet.


T

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