Exactly! Very far from a floating point expert here, but what I do is to scale-down by a few odd prime-power factors as appropriate: Scaling down by powers of

Exactly! Very far from a floating point expert here, but what I do is to scale-down by a few odd prime-power factors as appropriate: Scaling down by powers of 5 is obviously appropriate for decimals, currency etc. Scaling down by powers of 3 is good for angles measured in the degrees, minutes, seconds system. If one scales down a lot there is an increased risk of overflow, so one can compensate by scaling up some powers of 2. The way I think of this is as using my own manual exponent bias [0]. >the exponent is stored in the range 1 .. 254 (0 and 255 have special meanings), and is interpreted by subtracting the bias for an 8-bit exponent (127) to get an exponent value in the range −126 .. +127. So, for example, even single-precision number are always exact multiples of 1/(2^126), and I'm just changing the denominator to contain powers of 3, 5, 7, ... etc. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponent_bias https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exponent_bias