Re: Help from fellow Fortran Users

From: glen herrmannsfeldt (gah_at_ugcs.caltech.edu)
Date: 01/27/04 

Date: Tue, 27 Jan 2004 18:24:37 GMT

James Giles wrote:

(snip regarding big and little endian storage)

> Breaks anyway for modern floating point. The number of bits devoted to
> the exponent parts vary between single and double.

The IBM hexadecimal based floating point, which still exists on new
processors in addition to IEEE formats, uses a seven bit base 16
exponent for 32, 64, and 128 bit formats. It is fairly readable
in a hex dump, as the hexadecimal point will align with the hex
digits in the dump. Also, they are big endian.

-- glen