GNU bug report logs - #68871
Can't use od to print half-precision floats

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From: Pádraig Brady <P <at> draigBrady.com>
To: "Rozenberg, Eyal (Consultant)" <Eyal.Rozenberg <at> gehealthcare.com>, 68871 <at> debbugs.gnu.org
Subject: bug#68871: Can't use od to print half-precision floats
Date: Thu, 1 Feb 2024 18:05:10 +0000

[Message part 1 (text/plain, inline)]

On 01/02/2024 12:43, Rozenberg, Eyal (Consultant) wrote:
> If I try to use the od utility to print half-precision (FP16) floating-point values, I get:
> 
> $ od -t f2 myfloats.bin
> od: invalid type string 'f2';
> this system doesn't provide a 2-byte floating point type
> 
> I'm not exactly sure what "this system" means, but that should work and print out my floats.
> 
> Eyal
> 
> PS - This is my first bug-coreutils post, please be gentle.

I just had a read of these:
https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs/gcc/Half-Precision.html
https://www.open-std.org/jtc1/sc22/wg21/docs/papers/2018/p0192r4.html

On the face of it it seems that various 16 bit floating point formats have consolidated,
and we could add support for _Float16 in od.
I see gnulib already enables __STDC_WANT_IEC_60559_TYPES_EXT__
so we should be able to do something like the attached.

This is just off the top of my head, and I haven't tested
or thought about this much at all.
Any testing your could do would be appreciated.

thanks,
Pádraig

[od-f16.patch (text/x-patch, attachment)]

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