[fitsbits] 16-bit floats {External}

[Lucio Chiappetti]

On Wed, 23 Jul 2025, Barrett, Paul via fitsbits wrote:

> Yes, definitely. I have been advocating for half-precision (16-bit) 
> floating point for several years now for radio astronomy. In addition, 
> 128-bit floats

Are these formats supported by any major programming language ?

Is it worth supporting "exotic" formats, which might be suitable for some 
niche application, when most data producers often use improperly 64-bit 
all the times, even when overshoot ?

Historically FITS went the other way round (concentrating on 16 and 32, 
later 64, when mainframres with 36 or 60 bits were around).