Curious Omission In New-Style Formats

[Robert Kern]

On 2016-07-14 15:30, Ian Kelly wrote:
> 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".

Confirmed.

-- 
Robert Kern

"I have come to believe that the whole world is an enigma, a harmless enigma
  that is made terrible by our own mad attempt to interpret it as though it had
  an underlying truth."
   -- Umberto Eco