IBM Floating Point Architecture
IBM System/360 computers, and subsequent machines based on that architecture (mainframes), support a hexadecimal floating-point format.
In comparison to IEEE 754 floating-point, the IBM floating-point format has a longer significand, and a shorter exponent. All IBM floating-point formats have 7 bits of exponent with a bias of 64. The normalized range of representable numbers are from 16-65 to 1663 (approx. 5.39761 × 10-79 to 7.237005 × 1075).
The number is represented as the following formula: (-1)sign × 0.significand × 16exponent-64
Read more about IBM Floating Point Architecture: Single-precision 32-bit, Double-precision 64-bit, Extended-precision 128-bit, Arithmetic Operations, IEEE 754 On IBM Mainframes, Special Uses, Systems Which Use Base-16 Excess-64 Floating-Point Format
Famous quotes containing the words floating, point and/or architecture:
“I myself have seen the floating ships
And nothing will ever be the same
The shouts,
The harrowing voices within the house.
I stand apart with an army:
My mind is graven with ships.”
—Hilda Doolittle (1886–1961)
“There never comes a point where a theory can be said to be true. The most that one can claim for any theory is that it has shared the successes of all its rivals and that it has passed at least one test which they have failed.”
—A.J. (Alfred Jules)
“For it is not metres, but a metre-making argument, that makes a poem,—a thought so passionate and alive, that, like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature with a new thing.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)