Unum II announcement

[John L Gustafson via Digitalmars-d]

On Monday, 22 February 2016 at 18:42:03 UTC, Guillaume Piolat 
wrote:
> On Monday, 22 February 2016 at 17:42:07 UTC, Basile Burg wrote:
>>
>> "Reverse all bits but the first one and add 1, to reciprocate. 
>> Works without exception. +1 and –1 do not change."
>>
>> There's magic out there ;)
>
> What I don't get is: is there an exposant anymore? I don't see 
> any mention of it.

That's part of the breakthrough: the separation of bit fields 
that is so deeply built into IEEE floats, has far more drawbacks 
then advantages. That's where all the problems with gradual 
underflow, wasted bit patterns on NaNs, hidden bits, and wasted 
bit patterns in general, stem from. It is possible to extract the 
exponent, in the traditional sense, by an integer divide if the 
lattice is one chosen to be self-similar as the dynamic range 
increases. The integer divide need NOT be by a power of 2, nor do 
you need to do the divide very often at all... think different 
about the way we represent reals with bit strings!