bug#68871: Can't use od to print half-precision floats

[Pádraig Brady]

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
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