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Asked: 2026-05-16T00:08:11+00:00

Is it possible to change the float *pointer type that is used in the

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Is it possible to change the 

float *pointer

type that is used in the VS c++ project
to some other type, so that it will still behave as a floating type but with less range?
I know that the floating point values never exceed some fixed value in that project, so I want to optimize the program by memory it uses. It doesn’t need 4 bytes for each element of the ‘float *pointer’, 2 bytes will be enough I think. If I change a float to short and imitate the floating point behaviour, then it will use twice shorter memory. How to do it?

EDIT:

It calculates the probabilities. So there are divisions like
A / B
Where A < B,
And also B (and A) can be from 1 to 10 000.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    There is a standard 16-bit floating point format described in IEEE 754-2008 called “binary16”. It is specified as a format to store floating point values with reduced precisions. There is almost no compiler support for that yet (I think GCC supports it for certain ARM platforms), but it is quite easy to roll your own routines. This fellow:

    http://blog.fpmurphy.com/2008/12/half-precision-floating-point-format_14.html

    wrote a bit about it and also presents a routine to convert half-float <-> float.

    Also, here seems to be a half-float C++ wrapper class:

    half.h:
    http://www.koders.com/cpp/fidABD00D95DE84C73BF0218AC621E400E07AA77B53.aspx
    half.cpp
    http://www.koders.com/cpp/fidF0DD0510FAAED03817A956D251787609BEB5989E.aspx

    which supplies “HalfFloat” as a possible drop-in replacement type.

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