> On Aug 22, 2015, at 9:15 PM, Chuck Guzis <[email protected]> wrote:
>
> On 08/22/2015 04:40 PM, Paul Koning wrote:
>>
>>> On Aug 22, 2015, at 6:27 PM, Chuck Guzis <[email protected]> wrote:
>>>
>>> ...FLoating point can engender some interesting representations.
>>> Consider the exponent field on the aforementioned CDC 6000 series.
>>> It's a "biased by 2000 octal) system--and the assumed binary point
>>> of the mantissa is to the right of the LSB. So, 2000 0000 0000
>>> 0000 0001 octal = 1 exactly.
>>
>> EL-X8 doesn't use the bias, so the floating point representation of
>> an integer under 2^39 is the same as the integer representation. And
>> the rule for normalizing float values preserves that (normalization
>> makes the exponent as close to zero as possible -- rather different
>> than the usual rule).
>
> I recall the "integer multiply" feature (i.e. optional) available on the
> 6000. IXi Xj*Xk, but it didn't provide any more precision than the usual
> unnormalized double-precision multiply DXi Xj*Xk, but saved some time spent
> fiddling with exponent fields.
??? Never heard of any such thing. IXi Xj*Xk is a defined opcode, but it's
simply a synonym for Dxi Xj*Xk.
paul
