short float

[Philipp Klaus Krause]

While the idea of a short float was viewed favorably by the comitee a
few years ago, in London, the authors never followed up with a detailed
proposal.

I'd like to see short float in C, not just because a lot of hardware
supports it, but also as a relatively efficient floating-point type for
devices that don't have hardware support for floating-point at all:

http://www.colecovision.eu/stuff/proposal-short-float.html

[Dave Brower]

Just stumbled on this. If there are OpenGL unsigned floats, why not have 'unsigned short float' as a thing, with 'short float' as a signed type?

(Yes, I know it's a year later).

-dB

[Keith Thompson]

This:
https://www.khronos.org/opengl/wiki/Data_Type_(GLSL)
does not indicate that OpenGL has unsigned floats.

I found a reference to 10- and 11-bit unsigned floating-point types, but
I get the impression that they're not language-defined types.
https://www.oreilly.com/library/view/opengl-programming-guide/9780132748445/app07lev1sec3.html
C would not be able to support a type whose size is not a multiple of
CHAR_BIT (bit fields notwithstanding).

--
Keith Thompson (The_Other_Keith) Keith.S.T...@gmail.com
Working, but not speaking, for Philips Healthcare
void Void(void) { Void(); } /* The recursive call of the void */

[Philipp Klaus Krause]

The proposal is dead anyway. Many, including Nvidia, now see float,
double and long double as mistakes that can't be undone, but shouldn't
be repeated either.
They'd prefer all floating-point formats to be defined precisely down to
the last bit in representation and semantics.

Philipp

[jacob navia]

IEEE754 is dead also?

Can you point me to some written text by a comptetent authority that
says what you are saying?

Thanks