In article , Jonathan Kirwan wrote:

The old IBM 360 used base 16, so had to shift by four bits.
That's why its f.p. precision was so awful.

Interesting note about the 360. I only had a few opportunities
to program in BAL and never got into the floating point formats.

IIRC, the Navy's UYK-44 processor (probably UYK-20 as well,
though I'm not sure it did FP) also used base 16 for the
exponent, so increasing the exponent by 1 shifted the mantissa
by 4. I dare anybody to claim that's a useful bit of
information to have retained for 15+ years....

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Grant Edwards grante Yow! .. bleakness....
at desolation.... plastic
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