Re: Little Endian -> Big Endian (Ada95 / GNAT), Whats with floating point types?

["Warren W. Gay VE3WWG" <warren@ve3wwg.tk>]

I'll follow up to my other post as well...

Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:

> pburnand0-news@yahoo.com wrote:
>> Warren W. Gay VE3WWG wrote:
>>> Marius Amado Alves wrote:
>>>
>>>>> ... Also, there is a small performance penalty paid for
>>>>> shuffling bits around to achieve platform independence.
>>>>
>>>> But surely less than converting to an ASCII image and back. (I suspect
>>>> that, contrary to what has been indicated, the significant performance
>>>> loss in the ASCII solution is of time, not space.)
>>>>
>>>> But the ASCII solution is a nice, safe one if you don't have the 
>>>> time or
>>>> the will or the possibility to learn to use or just to use the
>>>> compiler's. Remember Ada has the wonderful 'Image and 'Value attributes
>>>> which take care of the conversion for you.
>>>
>>> I'm no floating point numeric expert, but by converting to
>>> a standard, say IEEE floating point format, you can still
>>> represent a machine dependant number with repeating decimal
>>> places in a IEEE floating point format (I assume).  Mind
>>> you, this depends heavily upon the differences between the
>>> two formats.
...
>> The floating point numbers are always rounded even in an FPU.  No 
>> software, no hardware can handle an infinite number of digits...
> 
> Of course. But my point was that some hardware does keep
> a bit (IIRC), that indicates that this is a repeating
> digit (binary/decimal).  The point of this is to reduce
> error.

According to :

   http://www.csit.fsu.edu/~burkardt/papers/ieee.html

there is no concept of a "repeating bit", as I vaguely
remembered it. In fact, its possible that 1 bit cannot do
this anyway, because you can have a group of digits
repeat (to represent this, requires more than 1 bit).

I can only guess that I recall some state information from
a FPU design somewhere.
-- 
Warren W. Gay VE3WWG
http://ve3wwg.tk