Re: database systems and organizational intelligence

"Laconic2" <laconic2_at_comcast.net> wrote:

[snip]

>The word "normalized" can apparently mean many things.
>
>My first exposure to this word was in the processor manuals description of
>floating point arithmetic.
>
>In particular, there were synonyms among the floating point representations.
>That is, different representations for the same number. Of these, one of
>them was chosen as the "normalized" representation. It was the one whose
>fraction had a high order bit that was different from the sign bit, or
>something like that. And there was an operator called the "unnormalized

     No. It is that there is effectively no leading zero bit in the mantissa. (Sometimes that first one bit is omitted in the representation though used in computation.)

          0.11001000 x 2 to the 4th     normalised representation
          0.00110010 x 2 to the 6th     unnormalised representation
            ^^ This is why.

>floating add" that would add to floating point operands, but not normalize
>the result.

[snip]

Sincerely,

Gene Wirchenko

Computerese Irregular Verb Conjugation:

     I have preferences.
     You have biases.
     He/She has prejudices.