this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
756 points (99.3% liked)
Programmer Humor
26846 readers
2351 users here now
Welcome to Programmer Humor!
This is a place where you can post jokes, memes, humor, etc. related to programming!
For sharing awful code theres also Programming Horror.
Rules
- Keep content in english
- No advertisements
- Posts must be related to programming or programmer topics
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Agreed, but in terms of efficiency wouldn't it make more sense to put the sign bit right before the mantissa in order to keep the memory layout more consistent with powers of two?
Having the sign bit in front, makes them compare like sign-bit-integers and if they are compared/sorted like 2s-complement integers, the negatives are reversed but still come after the positives.
I doubt the layout is relevant there as the FPU should be just physically wired to handle it.