[R] tried half-precision but "size 2 is unknown on this machine"

[Mike Miller]

Thanks for the pedantic insult, but no thanks.  I'd rather just hear if 
anyone reading this is able to make something like this work on any 
architecture:

vec <- 1:10/10
con <- file( "test.bin16", "wb" )
writeBin( vec , con, size=2 )
close(con)

If they can do it, they can tell me about it.  That shouldn't ruin the 
list for anyone else.

I can understand why a machine architecture would prevent floating-point 
operations with half-precision numbers, but I can't understand how it 
prevents us from encoding doubles as half-precision to store them in a 
file.  They could then be read back in, translated on the fly into 
doubles.  Like I said, I've been using integers instead of floats to store 
the numbers in files, but it could be slightly more convenient to use 
half-precision floats for storage instead of converting integers to 
floats.

Almost forgot.  Please tell me how this changes anything:

> sessionInfo()
R version 3.1.1 (2014-07-10)
Platform: x86_64-unknown-linux-gnu (64-bit)

locale:
  [1] LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8       LC_NUMERIC=C 
LC_TIME=en_US.UTF-8        LC_COLLATE=C 
LC_MONETARY=en_US.UTF-8    LC_MESSAGES=en_US.UTF-8    LC_PAPER=en_US.UTF-8 
LC_NAME=C                  LC_ADDRESS=C               LC_TELEPHONE=C 
LC_MEASUREMENT=en_US.UTF-8 LC_IDENTIFICATION=C

attached base packages:
[1] stats     graphics  grDevices utils     datasets  methods   base

loaded via a namespace (and not attached):
[1] tools_3.1.1


Also, this is how the hexbin package is described:

"Description" Binning and plotting functions for hexagonal bins."

So I guess that suggestion wasn't helping me much, either.

Mike


On Sat, 3 Jan 2015, Jeff Newmiller wrote:

> Your message is missing either a reproducible example or an indication 
> of your R environment (such as the output of sessionInfo()).
>
> Yes, the machine architecture can prevent certain types of operations. 
> This is however a poor venue for discussing such issues.
>
> I suggest that you investigate the hexbin package for binary data 
> handling, and if you still have issues then post again, following the 
> posting guide recommendations.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Jeff Newmiller                        The     .....       .....  Go Live...
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> Sent from my phone. Please excuse my brevity.
>
> On January 3, 2015 9:31:02 PM PST, Mike Miller <mbmiller+l at gmail.com> wrote:
>> It's an IEEE standard format:
>>
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-precision_floating-point_format#IEEE_754_half-precision_binary_floating-point_format:_binary16
>>
>> This is what I see:
>>
>>> writeBin(vec , con, size=2 )
>> Error in writeBin(vec, con, size = 2) : size 2 is unknown on this
>> machine
>>
>> I'm not sure what the machine has to do with it.  It's really up to the
>>
>> software, isn't it?
>>
>> Is there a way to get R to read/write half-precision numbers
>> (binary16)?
>>
>> It isn't a big deal for me because unsigned 16-bit integers are working
>>
>> well enough, but I'd like to have an answer for people who ask why I
>> make
>> them divide by 1000 all the time.  ;-)
>>
>> Mike
>>
>> ______________________________________________
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>> and provide commented, minimal, self-contained, reproducible code.
>