2 Sep
2006
2 Sep
'06
2:32 p.m.
On Sat, 2 Sep 2006 aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk wrote:
Hehe, I was gonna try and answer the first
question, but I admit I had no clue about q's
2 or 3. I don't no what the IEEE format is,
but I'd guess it would be Integer, Exponent,
Exponent, Exponent?
I think that you would enjoy:
Schaum's Outline Series : Essential Computer Mathematics by Seymour
Lipschutz ISBN:0-07-037990-4
It's a much more comfortable casual read than Rosen, etc.
Do you understand 2's complement notation?
IEEE floating point has
1 bit for sign (an actual sign bit!, rather than 2's complement),
8 bits for exponent (power of TWO to be multiplied to the mantissa,
stored as a "biased" number, NOT sign bit, nor 2's complement)
23 bits for 24 bit mantissa (when normalized, the high order bit is known,
and doesn't need to be stored) (Lipschutz has a minor error on that!)
Besides, without a computer (or appropriate
calculator) it would have taken ages to
work out the binary for question 1 (the initial
few bits would have been easy but the rest...
urgh!).
with practice, it gets easier, like any other binary conversion
Also.... in binary with binary points what would
the bits be known as that were below the
binary point?
If we have a value of say 11.111 which would
3.875 3 7/8
If you have CARPENTRY experience, then making .875 out of one half, plus
one quarter, plus one eighth becomes more obvious
be the first bit (bit 0)? The 2nd one (reading
left to right) or the 5th one (far right)?
There isn't a fixed standard for naming them.
Some people use 0 through 7 (or whatever) for the bits to the left of the
binary point, and use NEGATIVE numbers for the bits to the right, which
keeps the bit "name" matching the power of two.
But, not everybody likes to do it that way.
--
Grumpy Ol' Fred cisin at xenosoft.com