On Dec 8, 6:05 am, "Mario M. Mueller" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Tommy Nordgren wrote: > > [...] > > > One thing to consider: It is possible that one of the bytes > > contributes bits to BOTH the mantissa and the exponent ; > > From todays point of view I cannot exclude this. > > > Do you know the relative > > accurazy of the digitizer? > > Not yet. It's seismic data, that implies: > > - values will be positive and negative > - value range should cover several orders of magnitude > > Mario
What a strange thread. However, I have had experience with a computer that had 3-byte words. The Harris "H" series running VULCAN and VOS (yup) had three byte words. As I recall, the single-precision floats used two words, and ignored two of the bytes. The double precision floats used all six bytes. There was also a 12 byte quad precision (which is sort of impressive). However, ... are you *sure* that the digitizer was floating point? There are a few "floating point" ADCs out there today, but not very many, and I'd be amazed if there was a 20 year old one that was part of a seismic instrument. A 12 bit ADC has over 60 dB of dynamic range (in power) even with int encoding. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list