Re: [GD-General] The joy of type aliasing and C

[Brian H. <ho...@py...>]

> Surely, most hardware cannot work with float16 natively, but it is
> still useable for lossy compression of some data. As long as I
> define what I want my float16 to look like, it is not less portable
> than any other user defined type.

Sure.

> Generally, trying to look at a float as if it's some kind of a
> black box that stores real numbers, is kinda silly. 

I think this depends entirely on the application's domain.  A lot of 
applications will merrily use a float and perform floating point 
operations and have no care at all whether the underlying 
implementation is IEEE-754 or some freakish VAX implementation.

> You have to be
> aware of its internal representation, or you can't work with it
> (without getting yourself into various precision losses, etc). 

You can inspect an implementation's internal representation by using 
<float.h> and inspecting the associated predefined constants.  These 
are a part of the C standard and must exist on all implementations 
that claim to adhere to it.  These will give you the min, max, radix 
(FLT_RADIX), precision in digits (FLT_DIG), etc.

I feel so ashamed for knowing this stuff...

Brian