title: Looking for a half float or quarter float library
body: <p>I need to store values in a range of about -10000 to 10000. At the range borders, the precision needed is not very high (maybe about 64, I will see how it fits), around zero the precision needs to be 1 or better.</p>
  
  <p>Unfortunately space is <em>very</em> limited, not more than 12 bits, less would even be better. So strictly speaking, even <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Half-precision_floating-point_format">half floats</a> are out. Is there an open source library which handles some very short float formats with short mantissa and exponent length? Like 8 bit mantissa and 3 bit exponent.</p>
  
  <p>Only conversion from/to bigger formats is required, no arithmetic is done.</p>