this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Floating point arithmetics (eviltoast.org)
submitted 3 months ago by orhtej2@eviltoast.org to c/programmer_humor@programming.dev
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[–] aaaaaaaaargh@feddit.org 3 points 3 months ago (2 children)

Agreed, but in terms of efficiency wouldn't it make more sense to put the sign bit right before the mantissa in order to keep the memory layout more consistent with powers of two?

[–] anton@lemmy.blahaj.zone 13 points 3 months ago

Having the sign bit in front, makes them compare like sign-bit-integers and if they are compared/sorted like 2s-complement integers, the negatives are reversed but still come after the positives.

[–] markz@suppo.fi 8 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

I doubt the layout is relevant there as the FPU should be just physically wired to handle it.