Mastodawn

I Can't Believe It's Not Zero!Feb 12, 2023

Proposal: people prefer “mantissa” because it abbreviates better than “significand” (any truncation of which collides with “sign”). But “mantissa” is formally incorrect, since it already has a different meaning. So we should use “magnificand” instead.

- code that uses (s,e,m) still makes sense
- it’s the thing that is magnified by the exponent—the magnificand
- magnificent

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Taylor R Campbell

@steve This would also inspire endless insufferable debates about whether the ⟨c⟩ is pronounced /k/ (as in significand) or /s/ (as in magnificent), like the ⟨g⟩ in gif or the ⟨a⟩ in data.

Whether that's a pro or a con is left as an exercise for the reader—insufferable as those debates may be, they would serve to spread the word, so to speak.