If no one is really relying on them as of today, then I would strongly support allowing Matthew to break things and move fast. If anyone has a real need for such a data structure it can still probably be implemented later as a third-party library, possibly extended to user-specified-precision flonums.
I suspect that if Matthew feels a need to ask about this, this means the price of backward compatibility to pay for all of us may be quite significant. Personally, I have supported them in the past but not really used them, and I'm happy to revise my code accordingly. On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 11:37 AM Hendrik Boom <hend...@topoi.pooq.com> wrote: > On Thu, May 30, 2019 at 12:10:37PM +0200, Konrad Hinsen wrote: > > Am 29.05.19 um 17:52 schrieb Matthew Flatt: > > > > > Does anyone use single-flonums in Racket? > > > > Right now, no, but I have used them briefly in a past project, for > testing > > the impact of single-precision on a numerical algorithm. > > > > The main reason to use single-precision floats nowadays is cutting memory > > use in half, both because it is sometimes a scarce resource and because a > > smaller memory footprint means better cache utilisation. Single-precision > > arrays thus matter more than individual numbers. I have even seen > > half-precision floats being used for the same reason. With the current > > interest in "big data" and machine learning, I expect this tendency to > > increase. > > Way back in the 60's, on a decimal computer, when memories were small, a > friend reduced floating point precision to two digits in order to save > space. Two digits isn't much, but it ws enough. > > -- hendrik > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Racket Users" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/20190530103744.j2l7kmog7xznu6pr%40topoi.pooq.com > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Racket Users" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to racket-users+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/racket-users/CABNTSaFqqhr6jC-pYVXEiw25ffJ6GO%2BSwkmrhUdxFJ3Q4UV2TQ%40mail.gmail.com. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
