Another use is doing radix sort of floating point numbers. Since the exponent is in the most significant bits you can almost treat them as integers for radix so

Another use is doing radix sort of floating point numbers. Since the exponent is in the most significant bits you can almost treat them as integers for radix sort (you just need to be a bit careful with negative values): http://www.codercorner.com/RadixSortRevisited.htm http://www.codercorner.com/RadixSortRevisited.htm