Mark Dickinson wrote:
And base-16 floating-point is still used in current IBM hardware, but I don't know whether that's purely for historical/backwards-compatibility reasons, or because it's faster for the FPU.
Historically, base 16 was used to get a bigger exponent range for a given number of exponent bits. That was a bigger deal back when memory was very expensive. I doubt there's any advantage in it now. -- Greg _______________________________________________ Python-ideas mailing list Python-ideas@python.org https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-ideas Code of Conduct: http://python.org/psf/codeofconduct/
