bigfloat

[Bill Baxter]

On Thu, Apr 9, 2009 at 5:46 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
<SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
> 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?

Awesome.  So we can use it to create the IEEE Halfs that are used by
graphics cards?


> Care about numbers in [0, 1) at maximum
> precision? Give CustomFloat a shot.

By this do you mean you can get a fixed point format? (i'm guessing
so, just by setting exp bits to zero.)  If so, then that's very cool
too.

--bb