Why doesn’t Float alias to the machine bit size like Int? julia> Int Int64 julia> Float ERROR: UndefVarError: Float not defined

[image] `Float` type like `Int` type General Usage I find myself always writing a type alias for floating points in order to make my package neutral to machine word size: typealias Float Float64 Why there is no definition like Int that becomes Int64 or Int32 depending on…

There’s no need for it. Float64 is always a 64-bit type and Float32 is always 32-bit etc. and Int64 is always 64-bit and all types are on all platforms, but Int is usually 64-bit (not strictly an alias, so don’t really on it being more than Int32), i.e. except for on 32-bit platforms, where it’s al…

I would think Float == Float32 on 32 bit systems and Float == Float64 on 64 bit systems, so the precision depends on the system. Why is this behavior needed for Ints but not Floats?

32 bit systems usually still have Float64 hardware. The 32 bitness is related to the address space, and is independent of the parts of the chip used for doing floating point math.

No, it’s never been that way, Float64, aka double in C and C++ existed on 32-bit systems, even 16-bit.* For array indices you want to use Int, i.e. the machine integer you have. If it were Int64, then twice as large on 32-bit and that’s not needed or wanted. If you want e.g. to support money, then…

My understanding is that you can use any precision on any system by grouping bytes. The question is why there is an easy option to use a machine’s native precision for Int but not that option for Float. The difference between Int and Float is just how that string of 32 or 64 bits is interpreted righ…

32 bit systems have 64 bit FP registers

I swear I tried to search before posting …

[image] Nathan_Boyer: My understanding is that you can use any precision on any system by grouping bytes. The question is why there is an easy option to use a machine’s native precision for Int but not that option for Float. The difference between Int and Float is just how that string of 32 or 6…

It was a valid question, and to not necropost on the other, which I didn’t recall, I do support Julia explicit (about size) and I might make a type P16, because I think Posit16 might be a happy medium of sizes (see SoftPostit.jl), but not as an alias of Posit16, but with my own extension of it (base…

Why no Float type alias?

General Usage

oheil September 28, 2022, 7:58pm 8

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`Float` type like `Int` type General Usage proposal , faq	29	4457	March 14, 2017
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Why no Float type alias?

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