[fitsbits] 16-bit floats {External}

[Barrett, Paul]

Note: the IEEE has a working group drafting a standard for Floating-point
Arithmetic Formats in Machine Learning. This includes small floats.

https://standards.ieee.org/ieee/3109/11165/
<https://pretalx.com/redirect/?url=https%3A//standards.ieee.org/ieee/3109/11165/%3A22ee6o_67TshSU8x6K6xHxsk-X6z1ivzOTuxPICypZc>

On Thu, Jul 24, 2025 at 5:01 AM jaffe via fitsbits <
fitsbits at listmgr.nrao.edu> wrote:

> Whether a FITS storage format is supported by any programming language,
> or even any machine processor architecture is irrelevant, FITS is a
> transport standard.  If half-precision FP is accepted into the FITS
> standard, this implies that the FITS reader/writers for any language or
> architecture have to be adapted to convert the FITS data into a locally
> functional format, e.g. 32-bit FP if local 16-bit FP is not supported.
>
> Walter
>
> On 2025-07-23 20:11, Lucio Chiappetti via fitsbits 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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