Julia Evansfloating point representation
I Can't Believe It's Not Zero!@steve why do you say that? i just picked whatever term wikipedia was using, I don't have feelings about either of them
@b0rk "Mantissa" is very common, but the IEEE 754 standards (as well as Knuth and Kahan in their influential writings) have always used "significand," because "mantissa" isn't quite correct vis-a-vis it's traditional mathematical meaning when talking bout logarithms.
@b0rk Peter Cordes has an excellent summary in a comment on Stack Overflow: https://cs.stackexchange.com/a/152281
@b0rk TL;DR: everyone still knows what you mean if you say "mantissa", but "significand" is more correct.
Paul Cantrell@inthehands @b0rk yes, up to handwaving about normalization (is significand in [1/base,1) or [1,base)?)
Ben Cohen@steve fun fact: mantissa became more popular because “Sign of the Mantissa” was the name of the supplemental module booklet included in the 1983 revision of the Basic D&D box set
Cody Boone Ferguson@airspeedswift @steve I boosted this a long time back but I wanted to say thanks for this titbit about D&D! It brings back memories though my exposure to D&D was really through MUDDing (I didn't know anyone who played it and I wouldn't have played it with them anyway, D&D I mean).