Hunh. I just discovered that when you cast the 32 bit 2's complement -273613110 as an IEEE 754-2008 binary32 float, you get -109554765609536775148540002304.0 w

Hunh. I just discovered that when you cast the 32 bit 2's complement -273613110 as an IEEE 754-2008 binary32 float, you get -109554765609536775148540002304.0 which, when you look at it's in-memory representation as a series of octets on a little-endian machine, it's CAFEBOEF. How to get to DEADBEEF is left as an exercise for the reader. The next time I need a floating point constant, I'm picking -109554765609536775148540002304.0.