Floating Point Visually Explained
Okay, fine, I agree that sometimes mathematical notation is bad and we are all computer people here, not math people, so we get really scared of mathematical notation.<p>But is (-1)^S 1.M 2^(E-127) so bad that it required a whole blog post to explain it? Except for the "1.M" pseudo-notation to explain the mantissa with the implicit on bit, all of those symbols are found in most programming languages we use.<p>I don't think the value of the blog post was explaining the notation. We all knew what operations to perform when we saw it. The value seems to lie more in thinking of the exponent as the offset on the real line and the mantissa as a certain window inside that offset.<p>Personally, though, this still doesn't seem like a huge, deep insight to me, but maybe I'm just way too used to floating point and have forgotten how hard it was to learn this. I did learn about mantissa, exponents, and even learned how to use a log table in high school, but maybe I'm just old and had an unusual high school experience.