>both conversions lose the same amount of information This is exactly what's untrue. I said "orders of magnitude", but I could have said bits - they're analogo

>both conversions lose the same amount of information This is exactly what's untrue. I said "orders of magnitude", but I could have said bits - they're analogous concepts. Ints with the high 9 bits set to zero lose no information when converting to single precision floating point. The rest lose progressively more information, concentrated in the low order bits, up to 8 bits. Certainly regrettable, but usually manageable. Converting from floats to ints might be representable exactly, but if the number is, say, near 1, then it will be rounded to 1, losing 23 bits of information. If the number is near 0 then it will be rounded to 0, losing 31 bits of information.