On Thu, Mar 31, 2011 at 8:37 PM, Eli Stevens (Gmail) <wickedg...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. :)
There likely will not be a 1.7.0, if things with 2.0 go according to plan. It probably wouldn't be a very appropriate change for 1.6.1. > >> 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. If it works with Cython I think that's enough. With other libraries I did not mean that you should write patches for those, just some testing to make sure the change is 100% backwards compatible. >> 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. Sounds good. Cheers, Ralf _______________________________________________ NumPy-Discussion mailing list NumPy-Discussion@scipy.org http://mail.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
