[mathisfun123]

> I don't even know what vector addition should look like.

I think you're trying to imply you're inventing something new and racket enables you to explore... But what I read (as someone with a PhD in deep learning that has worked on sparsity) is you actually don't know the prior art and you're using racket as an excuse to reinvent a whole bunch of stuff that already exists in plenty of mature libraries in more mundane languages (including python/pytorch). Which is of course fine for personal growth but please don't oversell racket as a "superpower" - to wit I can manipulate any part of my stack too because it's all written in cpp.

[noosphr]

I once replaced IEEE 754 floating point numbers in a model by balanced ternary floating point numbers.

It took me 20 minutes.

Tell me how you'd do that in cpp?

[mathisfun123]

lol the same way we implement all of the reduced precision fp8, fp4 types today: by storing them in the corresponding uint:

https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/discussions/15095

[noosphr]

Balanced ternary fp is not a reduced precision type of binary fp: https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.10964

>Unlike their binary counterparts, posits and takums, tekums simultaneously accommodate both ∞ and NaR, while retaining the simplicity of negation by flipping the underlying trit string. Perhaps most strikingly, tekums enable rounding by truncation, a property that eradicates at a stroke some notorious problems of rounding in binary arithmetic: double rounding errors, cascading carries in hardware, and the attendant inefficiencies.

[mathisfun123]

> Balanced ternary fp is not a reduced precision type of binary fp

Yes I can read very well - can you?

> ... by storing them in the corresponding uint

[noosphr]

You do realise that you need to store arbitrary binary blobs which don't nicely align to memory words?

And that once you can store them you need to write custom functions that do bitwise manipulation on those arbitrary blocks of memory?

The stuff that's done in hardware for you on all binary fp?

Meanwhile in racket I got arbitrary balanced ternary manista and exponent precision in less time it took to write this post. Something that not available in C/Cpp even for binary fp?

[mathisfun123]

> You do realise that you need to store arbitrary binary blobs which don't nicely align to memory words? And that once you can store them you need to write custom functions that do bitwise manipulation on those arbitrary blocks of memory?

Yes what part of my response to you gave you the impression that I did not?

> Meanwhile in racket I got arbitrary balanced ternary manista and exponent precision in less time it took to write this post.

Your claim was that it could not be done in cpp, not that it was faster/simpler/whatever-new-goalpost-you're-now-presenting in racket.

> less time it took to write this post

An interpreted language with a runtime and a GC is easier to use than a systems language? I think this novel discovery is worth a turing award indeed! I'll be sure to refer you for one. Maybe even an honorary doctorate at my alma mater.