Reading textures independent of texel type

Accelerated Computing CUDA CUDA Programming and Performance
1

Here is an example of a texture reference:

texture<short,2,cudaReadModeNormalizedFloat> my_texture;

Is there a way to define and use a texture reference without knowledge of the type (“short” in the above example) used to store the values?

In my mind, the point of cudaReadModeNormalizedFloat is to not care what the texel format is, except that I can’t really not care since I have to pass the correct type to texture<…>.

Am I missing something?

Thanks,
Emil