Gregory's Serverhttps://float.exposed/ is really indispensable for explaining floating point -- it's SO fun to open it up and change the bits to show people how floating point works
 14 comments
   @b0rk I DIDNT REALIZE THERE WAS AKWAYS A LEADING 1! I’ll Google but if you have an eli5 as to WHY it was done this way I’m curious! @b0rk like, I’d always thought that a significand of “10” was directly multiplied by the exponentiated base, not “1.000….0010” @simonf huh seems like it would be harder to build in the first place by having to have a single off-case. @gemini6ice Ha. Indeed IIRC some early processors handled the special denorm cases as a trap and might have been in software or microcode or something. Either way, not fast. Poor me, OTOH, who was doing very very early driver for certain 3D hardware and needed to convert floats to a custom semi-float format, thought he’d be clever and scale vals into the denorm range. Couldn’t work out why it was sooooo sloooowww @gemini6ice Suffice to say I changed the mapping code to NOT use denorms, and we designed the second generation of the graphics chip to read floats directly. @b0rk Nice. @b0rk bartoz ciechanowski has such a talent for building extremely useful little interactive pedagogical things like this . its AWESOME |
@b0rk oh no