Re: S/360

robin wrote:

(snip)

> Again I didn't say that at all.  What I did say was that
> there were design considerations, in particular the choice of hex
> reduced the number of ****fts required for post normalization
> from 23 to 5 for single precision, and correspondingly
> for double precision (55 and 13).  This gave a good range of exponent,
> consistent with a reasonable number of mantissa bits.

I believe this is true for some cases.  I don't know that S/360
satisfied those cases.

(snip)

> YOU raised the question of "mantissa", saying that I didn't
> know what the word means, and implying that the word was
> used incorrectly, which it wasn't.  And isn't.
> Whereas in fact, all along it's YOU who doesn't know what
> the word means.

It is wrong.  The fact that it is done fairly often doesn't
change the fact that it is wrong.  IBM consistently uses 'fraction'
instead of 'mantissa' in their do***entation.  (If used wrong often 
enough it will eventually be adopted.  As far as I know, that hasn't 
happened yet.)

-- glen