I just now learned about this discussion and I see quite a few messages I need to reply to.
I am very excited about a Julia version of unum arithmetic, and it does seem like the ideal language for it. Alan Edelman, Deepak Vinchhi, and Viral Shah proposed to create it with funding from A*STAR in Singapore, and the last I heard, they were very likely to get funded. (a...@juliacomputing.com, vi...@juliacomputing.com, and deepak.vinc...@juliacomputing.com, if you want to contact them.) I also received an email expressing interest in a Julia port of unums from David P. Sanders (dpsand...@ciencias.unam.mx), who certainly would be interested in this thread. It is difficult to get across all the ramifications of unum arithmetic with a PowerPoint presentation. I may be able to clear up some of the questions I see here by posting replies. One thing that helps is Amazon's "Look inside the book" option, which lets you read enough of the beginning to get the definition of unum arithmetic and some other details, for free. On Saturday, July 25, 2015 at 6:11:54 AM UTC-7, Job van der Zwan wrote: > > So I came across the concept of UNUMs on the Pony language mailing list > <http://lists.ponylang.org/pipermail/ponydev/2015-July/000071.html> this > morning. I hadn't heard of them before, and a quick search doesn't show up > anything on this mailing list, so I guess most people here haven't either. > They're a proposed alternate encoding for numbers by John L. Gustafson. > This presentation by him sums it up nicely: > > http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/files/2013/03/Right-SizingPrecision1.pdf > > “Unums”(universal numbers) are to floating point what floating point is to >> fixed point. >> Floating-point values self-describe their scale factor, but fix the >> exponent and fraction size. Unums self-describe the exponent size, fraction >> size, and inexact state, and include fixed point and IEEE floats as special >> cases. >> > > The presentation can be seen here, provided you have the Silverlight > plugin: > > > http://sites.ieee.org/scv-cs/archives/right-sizing-precision-to-save-energy-power-and-storage > > Now, I don't know enough about this topic to say if they're a good or bad > idea, but I figured the idea is interesting/relevant enough to share with > the Julia crowd. > > I'm also wondering if they could be implemented (relatively) easily within > Julia, given its flexible type system. If so, they might provide an > interesting advanced example, no? >
