> Maybe I misunderstand, but isn't that a similar idea to what I just described? Adding an offset to "rotate" the ranges of the exponent by a segment... Yes it

> Maybe I misunderstand, but isn't that a similar idea to what I just described? Adding an offset to "rotate" the ranges of the exponent by a segment... Yes it is similar. It seems to me that there really isn't that many useful operations that can be applied to the exponent beside adding an offset. But that's only a suspicion, do not take my word for it. > I suspect that ensuring NaN and Infinity are in there will be crucial to avoid performance cliffs... This is a reasonable assumption. There are in fact ways to rotate and add an offset such that the exponent can overflows/underflows to capture exponents 0 and 0x7ff (for inf and nan) with a single well-positioned tag. Making it work in practice is not as simple, but we are working on it.