bigfloat

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Paul D. Anderson wrote:
> Walter Bright Wrote:
> 
>> Paul D. Anderson wrote:
>>> b) the features and functions that should be included.
>> I'd say NaNs and unordered comparisons. In other words, it should 
>> support the same semantics as float, double and real do.
>> 
>> If you've got the time and interest, adding all the functions in 
>> std.math would be great!
> 
> I'm not sure I can sign up for ALL of std.math. I'm sure I'll need
> help.  I can do roots, powers and transcendental functions, though.
> Maybe not very efficiently (power series).
> 
> (If very high precision numbers are questionable, how valuable are
> high precision sine and cosine??)
> 
> Paul

Would be great if we could enlist Don's help. Don? :o)

In only slightly related news, the "new, new" Phobos2 offers custom 
floating-point numbers, see

http://erdani.dreamhosters.com/d/web/phobos/std_numeric.html

They aren't infinite precision (which makes their utility orthogonal on 
bigfloat's), but they allow fine tweaking of floating point storage. 
Want to cram floats in 16 or 24 bits? Care about numbers in [0, 1) at 
maximum precision? Give CustomFloat a shot.


Andrei