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From: jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Unusual instructions and constructions - words
Message-ID: <18203@lanl.gov>
Date: 18 Mar 91 16:54:13 GMT
References: <7499@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <4748@eastapps.East.Sun.COM> <7571@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> <3800.27dfaacf@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com>
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Reply-To: jlg@cochiti.lanl.gov (Jim Giles)
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From article <3800.27dfaacf@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com>, by
herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com:

> [...]
> An interesting historical note:  Early 8087 data sheets talked about
> exponent and mantissa.  After a few years, that changed to exponent and 
> significand.  Even in the technical notes.  The president of Intel had
> a paper published somewhere (or maybe it was a transcription of a 
> speech) and it talked about exponent and mantissa.  The company changed
> words, but the president didn't.  I missed whatever it was that triggered
> that change.

The IEEE floating point standard uses the term "significand".  It may
be that this is the origin of the term.  In any case, it is a better
term than "fraction".  In some floating point representations normalized
numbers have a significand that is between 1 and 2 - "fraction" would
be an inappropriate term for the significand of such representations.

J. Giles