[fitsbits] 16-bit floats {External}

[Barrett, Paul]

These formats are available in the Julia programming language. Adding them
to FitsFiles.jl should take minimal effort, say a few days at most.

 -- Paul


On Wed, Jul 23, 2025, 16:13 Lucio Chiappetti via fitsbits <
fitsbits at listmgr.nrao.edu> wrote:

> 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).
>
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