Mainframe floating point math implementation.

[Charles Anthony]

On Sun, Mar 13, 2016 at 3:48 PM, Eric Smith <spacewar at gmail.com> wrote:

> They may effectively have a "sticky" bit, similar to that used in IEEE
> 754 FP.  A sticky bit is used when shifting an operand right; if any
> one bits are shifted into the stick bit position, the sticky bit
> becomes 1, but shifting a zero into it does not clear it to zero. IEEE
> 754 uses the sticky bit to implement correct rounding.
>
> In this case, if there's a sticky bit it would prevent a non-zero
> operand mantissa that is shifted right from ever actually reaching
> zero.  If that operand is negative, that might result in the behavior
> you're seeing, where one ULP is being subtracted from the other
> operand.
>

'sticky bit' is what got me through to the 47th test, so it's close but not
quite right. (Assuming I implemented it correctly. "if shifted mantissa is
all ones and any ones were shifted out, then set the mantissa to 0".)


-- Charles