Implementing Half Floats in D

[Don]

On Wednesday, 30 January 2013 at 12:51:18 UTC, Simen Kjaeraas 
wrote:
> On 2013-01-30, 09:26, Don wrote:
>
>> The discussion we had on github agreed that std.halffloat 
>> isn't a good place.
>> But OTOH std.numeric needs a complete overhaul, it's a mess.
>> It would be a mistake to throw it in there.
>
> So put it somewhere else for the moment, and move it to 
> std.numeric after
> a while? Boy, does that ever sound stupid.

Yes, of course that would be stupid. It will never be in 
std.numeric.

> I say stuff it in std.numeric, and announce properly that 
> someone should
> probably have look at fixing std.numeric, and that HalfFloat in 
> there may
> be the only thing salvageable (not that I know if it is, but 
> that's how
> you make it sound).

std.numeric is not superficially flawed, it's fundamentally 
flawed. What is it for? What is its theme? The problem is, 
std.numeric is one of the few good names which are left as a 
possible package name, after C insulted the mathematical 
community by creating a module called 'math'.