Hi All,

    who wrote the Float class comment?  Two things,

- first the comment mentions "I" and thanks several people, but there is no comment stamp to reveal the author.  It would be lovely if the author could "sign" this comment

- second, there seems to be a minor error (but I'm no expert), the comment states

"It may help you to know that the basic format is...

sign 1 bit

exponent 11 bits with bias of 1023 (16r3FF) to produce an exponent

in the range -1023 .. +1024

- 16r000:

significand = 0: Float zero

significand ~= 0: Denormalized number (exp = -1024, no hidden '1' bit)

- 16r7FF:

significand = 0: Infinity

significand ~= 0: Not A Number (NaN) representation

mantissa 53 bits, but only 52 are stored (20 in the first word, 32 in the second).  This is because a normalized mantissa, by definition, has a 1 to the right of its floating point, and IEEE-754 omits this redundant bit to gain an extra bit of precision instead.  People talk about the mantissa without its leading one as the FRACTION, and with its leading 1 as the SIGNFICAND."

But if the significand has a leading zero then surely the section in the middle should read

sign 1 bit

exponent 11 bits with bias of 1023 (16r3FF) to produce an exponent

in the range -1023 .. +1024

- 16r000:

mantissa = 0: Float zero

mantissa ~= 0: Denormalized number (exp = -1024, no hidden '1' bit)

- 16r7FF:

mantissa = 0: Infinity

mantissa ~= 0: Not A Number (NaN) representation

Right?

--

best,

Eliot