Implement the "unum" representation in D ?

[Nick B via Digitalmars-d]

Hi

John Gustafson was in town (Wellington, NZ) for the Multicore 
World Conference 2016 ( http://www.multicoreworld.com/) 
conference. I caught up with him, tonight, and spoke to him for 
about two hours. Here is a quick summary of what we discussed.  
John has just redesigned Unums, to address the design issues in 
version 1.0.  He presented his Powerpoint presentation to the 
conference, with the details of Unums 2.0 (this is a tentative 
name at present).  Its a improved design, but I will only brief 
detail it:  "It  will have  more dynamic range with 16-bit values 
than IEEE half-precision, but only by a small amount. Still 
remarkable to be uniformly better in dynamic range and precision, 
with support for inexact values and perfect reciprocation. If a 
language supports just one unum data type, John believes it 
should be the 16-bit one".  John has agreed to provide a link to 
the Powerpoint presentation, in a couple of weeks, and then 
later, a link to his new published paper on the subject, when it 
is ready.  There will likely be a new book, building on version 
1.0, and, again, tentatively titled 'Unums 2.0'. I also discussed 
with him, about integrating it with D. At the present, there is a 
'C' codebase under construction, but this could be rewritten in D 
in the future.  D may require some language changes, and a new 
phobos library, to support this advanced functionality. Of course 
Walter will have decide if he wants this advanced numbering 
system as a part of D.

As an aside, John mentioned that Rex Computing 
(http://www.rexcomputing.com/) is using Unums with the Julia 
language, for their new hyper-efficient processor architecture. 
It will be interesting to see what these whiz kids deliver in 
time.

cheers
Nick