2 Sep
2006
2 Sep
'06
3:20 p.m.
--- Fred Cisin <cisin at xenosoft.com> wrote:
n,
ry
s
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 Rose etc.
Thanks. I'll see if I can find that.
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!)
Well, I already new about signed and unsigned
bytes/numbers. But the rest I don't follow
100% (not sure what mantissa is).
I have learnt alot in recent years, some from
groups/email lists like this and other stuff
from my recently acquired collection of
80
Microcomputing (aka 80 Micro) - I now have
issues 1 to 60 (just got the last 40 to get) ;)
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 bina conversion
Like lot's of things in life, the more you do it
the better/quicker you are a it.
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 bit to the right, which
keeps the bit "name" matching the power of two.
But, not everybody likes to do it that way.
That sounds like a sensible way to me.
Regards,
Andrew B
aliensrcooluk at yahoo.co.uk