MUmuizelaar·Apr 26, 2016
Here's a python port of Gustafson's Mathematica unum implementation that I did:
https://github.com/jrmuizel/pyunum
In The End of Numeric Error: An interview with John L. Gustafsonjrmuizel
pyunum
Python2015–2016
jrmuizel / pyunum
pyunum
Python port of the Mathematica unum prototype from "The End of Error"
2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
51GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Python port of the Mathematica unum prototype from "The End of Error"
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.
No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.
Also in these discussions
No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.
This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by month2 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2015-07-24 20:58:31 UTC to 2016-04-26 18:30:41 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jul 2015 | 2015-07-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| Aug 2015 | 2015-08-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Sep 2015 | 2015-09-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Oct 2015 | 2015-10-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Nov 2015 | 2015-11-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Dec 2015 | 2015-12-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Jan 2016 | 2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Feb 2016 | 2016-02-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Mar 2016 | 2016-03-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| Apr 2016 | 2016-04-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2016-05-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesNot many. I did go ahead and purchase his book. It's... kind of a weird read, honestly. Useful - it clarified some things about the proposed Unum format - but also written very casually, like "pop science" prose, which seems inappropriate - who would buy a book about a floating-point number format if they didn't want a dry, boring book full of technical details? Some of the arguments are made as though to convince a non-technical audience - maybe Gustafson wants managers (or former engineers who haven't worked as engineers for a long time) to read his book, but I think it would have been better to publish all of the details without any fluff, first.
Also worth noting that half of the book is about the "ubox" method for solving optimization problems - also cool, but may be overkill if you are just interested in the numeric format itself. P
Read the rest
ersonally, I've been working on an implementation of the format that I can toy around with - I have no real interest in learning a lot about the cool algorithms I could do with it until I can show myself that it works for basic arithmetic, etc, as well as the author claims.
Gustafson also makes the code available (I think [here](https://www.crcpress.com/The-End-of-Error-Unum-Computing/Gus...). It's Mathematica code... there is a free viewer for that format (if you don't have Mathematica) which can print out a PDF with richly formatted equations.
Also, Googling for that link led me to this [Python implementation someone whipped up](https://github.com/jrmuizel/pyunum).