> I suppose one could use some sort of power of ten entation; wouldn't
> make the math any better but might make the conversion to human-
> readable more satisfying.

Sometimes things come full circle. Many of the early computers used decimal=
 representations, both for integer and floating point values. Now, there is=
 a IEEE standard IEEE 754-2008 for decimal floating point which is implemen=
ted in the POWER6 chip and on IBM 'z9' "mainframes". "See https://en.wikipe=
dia.org/wiki/Decimal_floating_point".

My 37-year-old Northstar Horizon S100-bus machine also uses a decimal float=
ing point format in its Basic. The mantissa is stored as an 8 digit BCD val=
ue, the sign and (binary) exponent are packed into a fifth byte. In fact, N=
orthstar actually sold a hardware coprocessor, based on a bit-slice impleme=
ntation, for decimal floats.

~ Bob Ammerman
RAm Systems



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