@b0rk @fclc gold star for “significand” instead of “mantissa”.

@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

@inthehands @b0rk yes, up to handwaving about normalization (is significand in [1/base,1) or [1,base)?)