Re: Making Lemonade (Floating-point format changes)

On Sun, 12 May 2024 20:12:22 +0000, mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
wrote:

Question:: why are you all so gung-ho on having a format without a hidden bit.
It is trivially easy to reconstruct::
>
    h = expon != 0;
>
Taking little time of even gates; and is something you HAVE to do anyway.

The explanation here is, I am afraid, probably once again ignorance on
my part. I knew that processing the hidden bit would take _some_ time
and effort, since, after all, in the early days computers didn't use
formats that had one.

So I assumed that converting to an internal format without a hidden
bit - even the 8087 did that - would yield a significant speed up.
(And, as noted, I'm following Seymour Cray in sacrificing everything
for speed, so even if the speedup is small, I am inclined to chase
it.)

John Savard