Extracting bit fields from an IEEE-784 float

Mark Dickinson dickinsm at gmail.com
Mon Jul 30 12:14:32 EDT 2012


On Monday, July 30, 2012 3:16:05 PM UTC+1, Grant Edwards wrote:
> The last ones I worked on that where the FP format wasn't IEEE were
> 
> the DEC VAX and TI's line if 32-bit floating-point DSPs.  I don't
> 
> think Python runs on the latter, but it might on the former.

For current hardware, there's also IBM big iron:  the IBM System z10 apparently has hardware support for IBM's hexadecimal floating-point format in addition to IEEE 754 binary *and* decimal floating-point.  But IIUC, a typical Linux installation on one of these machines uses the IEEE 754 stuff, not the hexadecimal bits.  So unlikely to be an issue for Python.

-- 
Mark



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