2 Sep
2006
2 Sep
'06
11:55 a.m.
On 9/2/2006 at 11:01 AM CRC wrote:
>>> I have never seen a hex number with a
decimal point anyway...
>
> Nor will you; as Fred already pointed out, it's a hexadecimal point.
> That aside, they do exist, though they're rare. While practically
> everything these days uses IEEE floating-point, which is binary-based,
> there have been machines with floating-point arithmetic that worked in
> other bases, like octal or hex. For them, speaking of the "decimal"
> point in a number printed in hex notation makes perfect sense.
Well, just wait a second. Seems to me that years ago (I probably still
have the article), I recall an HP Journal publication that proposed to
represent decimal numbers with a decimal point with a binary integer part
and a fractional part made up of groupings of 10 bits to represent 000-999.
I don't recall the gist of the perceived advantages. But one might argue
that this was a case of a hex number with a decimal point.
Cheers,
Chuck