Curious Omission In New-Style Formats

[Ian Kelly]

On Jul 14, 2016 1:52 AM, "Steven D'Aprano"
<steve+comp.lang.python at pearwood.info> wrote:
>
> On Thursday 14 July 2016 15:18, Ian Kelly wrote:
>
> > Side note, neither do floating point numbers, really; what is often
> > called the mantissa is more properly known as the significand. But
> > integers don't have that either.
>
>
> Er, then what's a mantissa if it's not what people call a float's mantissa?
>
> What makes you say it is "more properly" known as the significand?
>
> I'm not necessarily disputing what you say, I'm wondering what is your
> justification for it.

http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Significand.html
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/Mantissa.html

The significand of -3.14159 is the sequence of digits 314159. The
mantissa of -3.14159 is the number 0.85841.

I don't have a copy of the IEEE-754 standard, but I believe that it
also uses the term "significand" and specifically avoids the term
"mantissa".