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:
“The structure was designed by an old sea captain who believed that the world would end in a flood. He built a home in the traditional shape of the Ark, inverted, with the roof forming the hull of the proposed vessel. The builder expected that the deluge would cause the house to topple and then reverse itself, floating away on its roof until it should land on some new Ararat.”
—For the State of New Jersey, U.S. public relief program (1935-1943)
“The point of the dragonfly’s terrible lip, the giant water bug, birdsong, or the beautiful dazzle and flash of sunlighted minnows, is not that it all fits together like clockwork--for it doesn’t ... but that it all flows so freely wild, like the creek, that it all surges in such a free, finged tangle. Freedom is the world’s water and weather, the world’s nourishment freely given, its soil and sap: and the creator loves pizzazz.”
—Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
“I don’t think of form as a kind of architecture. The architecture is the result of the forming. It is the kinesthetic and visual sense of position and wholeness that puts the thing into the realm of art.”
—Roy Lichtenstein (b. 1923)