3 ms·

In addition to what's mentioned in the already great sibling comments, it's worth noting that IEEE floating point is signed-magnitude.

• jovial_cavalier 8y ago
  Is there a good way to represent floating points in order to do complement arithmetic?
  • garmaine 8y ago
    Yes, see JavaScript: https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_numbers.asp https://www.w3schools.com/js/js_numbers.asp
    • dbaupp 8y ago
      JS is IEEE754, not a (one's or two's) complement-based representation.
      • garmaine 8y ago
        Ah I misunderstood the question.
  • hamiltonkibbe 8y ago
    If you know a bit about the range you need to support you could use a fixed point representation
• userbinator 8y ago
  Sign-magnitude for the significand, and offset-binary for the exponent. The reason for this odd combination is probably historical.
  • p1mrx 8y ago
    It doesn't seem odd to me. When describing things in nature, (+x, -x) tend to have more symmetry than (x, 1/x).
  • akrasuski1 8y ago
    It's done so that the bits will compare the same way whether treated as float or int. (modulo NaNs and stuff)
    • nhaehnle 8y ago
      That is only true for non-negative floating point numbers. It's still useful though. Interestingly, posits as originally proposed do have this property (except for infinity).
      • garmaine 8y ago
        Would have been nice if IEEE stored the complement sign.
  • exDM69 8y ago
    It's also practical for hw implementation and has other nice qualities. E.g. comparisons and sorting are easy. Radix sort works for floating point (with some bit magic). Terms and conditions may apply (oddities w.r.t. INF, Nan, etc).