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API specification seems to assume all arrays are floats

Open eric-wieser opened this issue 4 years ago • 2 comments

The description of __abs__ and especially __add__ seems to try to go into great detail about how floating point addition / abs works.

I'd argue this obscures the intent behind what is ultimately a container API, and it would be better to refer to the IEEE 754 spec (or perhaps add a separate page summarizing IEEE 754)

eric-wieser avatar Nov 11 '20 11:11 eric-wieser

That does sound like a good idea to make things easier on the reader. A separate page summarizing IEEE 754 sounds good to me, because that standard is non-free as well as painful to read.

rgommers avatar Nov 11 '20 11:11 rgommers

Rather than add a separate page, an alternative could be to place IEEE 754 details, or special cases in general, within a collapsible HTML section (aka, a details element).

kgryte avatar Oct 04 '21 07:10 kgryte

As part of https://github.com/data-apis/array-api/issues/533, we'll move special cases below the fold, which should help address this issue. As such, I'll go ahead and close.

kgryte avatar Jun 29 '23 09:06 kgryte