On 27/02/07, Travis Oliphant <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > The problem is that we aren't really specifying floating-point > standards, we are specifying float, double and long double as whatever > the compiler understands. > > There are some platforms which don't follow the IEEE 754 standard. > This format specification will not be able to describe > platform-independent floating-point descriptions. > > It would be nice to have such a description, but that is not what > struct-style syntax does. Perhaps we could add it in the specification, > but I'm not sure if the added complexity is worth holding it up over.
Hmm. If this is to be used to describe, say, binary data in files on disk, having machine-independent formats would be very handy. The endianness specifiers are there to provide this for integers, because it's so useful. I realize that if a machine doesn't implement IEEE floats it will be pretty much impossible to implement python functions to work with them, or even just decode them, but it would be nice to be able to at least *specify* them. How much more complicated would it be to allow their specification? One letter for each IEEE type, in addition to the existing letters for platform-specific floats? Anne M. Archibald _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list [email protected] http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
