Some eons ago I wrote Pascal routines to do 16bit floating point to enter data from 1.00f to 1.00T (signed) to enter medical data such as 7.5mmol. The mantissas were all between 0 and 999 (10 bits). It accepted and translated e notation to ISO. The advantage was that numbers could be entered as they appeared in medical records. It could add, mpy and div but obviously one had to be careful of round off. I converted a lot of it to asm but it was using Borland Pascal. If anybody is interested I could try to resurrect this.
Garst
