The IEEE 754 representation of a floating point number is basically (-1)^2 x c x 2^q s=sign bit c=significand (or 'coefficient') q=exponent
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754-2008 E is most accurately represented by: 6121026514868073 x 2^-51 though on my SPARC the best one gets is 6121026514868074 x 2^-51 I wanted to know how to convert a floating point number to that format using Mathematica. The very knowledgeable and helpful Daniel Lichtblau of Wolfram Research answered my question on sci.math.symbolic. I must admit I was impressed how few lines of code it took him. $ cat RealToIEEE754.m RealToIEEE754[x_]:=Block[{s,digits,expon,c,q}, s=Sign[x]; {digits,expon}=RealDigits[x,2]; c = FromDigits[digits, 2] ; q = expon - Length[digits] ; {s,c,q} ] In[1]:= <<RealToIEEE754.m In[2]:= RealToIEEE754[Exp[1.]] Out[2]= {1, 6121026514868074, -51} I was wondering how elegant one could implement that in Sage. -- To post to this group, send an email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send an email to sage-devel+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URL: http://www.sagemath.org
