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From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: IEEE arithmetic (Goldberg paper)
Message-ID: <13194@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 5 Jun 91 11:16:28 GMT
References: <9106010224.AA28532@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <1991Jun5.045615.8772@fido.wpd.sgi.com>
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In article <1991Jun5.045615.8772@fido.wpd.sgi.com>, dehnert@baalbek.asd.sgi.com (Jim Dehnert) writes:
> In <9106010224.AA28532@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> jbs@WATSON.IBM.COM writes:

			......................

> >          79 bits is clearly an absurd length for a floating point
> >format (the same is true of the 43 bit single extended format).
> 
> An interesting statement.  Are you of the "only powers of two are real
> numbers" persuasion?

Why should it even be the case that the exponent and significand are in
the same word?  Or that multiple precision, or complex, numbers are in
contiguous words?  Even these give problems from the standpoint of
vector machines.  If we had the exponent and significand in different
units, the separation of integer arithmetic from floating arithmetic
might neve have occurred.  Some machines do not even have separate units;
they must have unnormalized arithmetic.
-- 
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)   {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)