On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 10:40 AM, Ralf Gommers <ralf.gomm...@googlemail.com> wrote: > It would definitely need to get into beta 2, and even then I'm a > little hesitant to push in such a change at the last moment.
If I miss the 1.6.0b2 cutoff, would a change like this be appropriate for 1.6.1, or will it need to wait until 1.7.0? I wish I'd known that half floats were going to be in 1.6.0 (the bug tracker says 2.0); I'd have started working on this a few weeks earlier. :) > It would > need some testing with other libraries that use the numpy buffer > protocol. I am currently working on a patch for cython to accept half-floats. ATM, it is able to accept the data from numpy (though it does not yet handle the bit-fiddling to expand the values into a float32 on read, nor collapse it from a float32 back into a float16 on write). The code change to numpy was literally a one-line change to add NPY_HALF to a switch statement (though I haven't tried to import half floats yet). Is one other library enough, or will I need to find another library to patch as well? I think that OpenCL would probably be my next choice, since I think that we'll eventually want float16 support there too. > Also, reading back the thread, Pauli seemed to disagree with > this. On Fri, Mar 25, 2011 at 10:21 AM, Pauli Virtanen <p...@iki.fi> wrote: > The buffer interface cannot be used to export the half-float types, since > the type is not specified in PEP 3118. Numpy cannot unilaterally add > nonstandard format codes to the spec. I'm currently in the process of submitting a patch to CPython to update the struct module to handle half-floats. So far, the response on python-ideas has been generally positive (a couple +1s from people with commit bits, GVR has chimed in on the thread with an aside (but not an objection), etc.). Unless I'm misunderstanding the objection, making half-floats an official part of the spec (the discussion on python-ideas explicitly notes that numpy driving force behind the change) would satisfy Pauli's concern. Next up for me is to get a patch onto the CPython issue tracker, but as soon as I have that done, I'll start working on adding unit tests to my numpy fork. I anticipate being able to get that done today. Thanks! Eli _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion