CBM had 5 byte floats, but when they were copied into the floating point "registers", they were expanded into a 6 or 7 byte representation for speed. It was 8

CBM had 5 byte floats, but when they were copied into the floating point "registers", they were expanded into a 6 or 7 byte representation for speed. It was 8 bits of exponent, 1 bit sign, and 31 bits of mantissa (with one extra implicit bit since the leading bit is always 1). It's true there was very little performance gain to using BASIC integer variables, since they'd be converted to floats internally almost always. The one real advantage of integers is that a DIMed array of ints was more compact than an array of floats.