"glen herrmannsfeldt" <gah@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote in message
news:I62dnRS6YruW2qrZRVn-hg@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> 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.
We are referring to the S/360, and my comments have been
about that machine.
> > 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.)
The word "mantissa" has been used, and correctly, since the
early days of computing, and you will find it in many texts
describing the S/360 and /370. I listed some in this newsgroup.
|
