On Mon, 13 Feb 1995 12:51:19 +0000 (GMT), Tim Paveley said: > Just done Floating POint Numbers in my Maths course, and I was wondering > what the Sam used, ie mantisa length and maximum exponent.
Same as the spectrum - 5 bytes (i.e., part way between "single" and "double" precision :-) ). The exponent occupies the first byte and is a power of 2 between -128 and +127 (128 is added before the number is stored). The mantissa occupies the remaining 4 bytes and is normalised so that the decimal point occurs just before the first bit, and so that the first bit is always 1. This being the case, the first bit is not stored and is instead replaced with a sign bit. imc
