[fitsbits] 16-bit floats {External}

[Mohammad Akhlaghi]

As mentioned before, it is also available in C:

https://www.gnu.org/software/c-intro-and-ref/manual/html_node/Floating-Representations.html

Cheers,
Mohammad



On July 23, 2025 10:22:12 PM GMT+02:00, "Barrett, Paul via fitsbits" <fitsbits at listmgr.nrao.edu> wrote:
>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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