Why is there no better representation for floating points than sign and magnitude?

Posted by cambr on Stack Overflow See other posts from Stack Overflow or by cambr
Published on 2010-04-19T14:56:16Z Indexed on 2010/04/19 16:43 UTC
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floating-point

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double

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twos-complement

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float

We have 2's complement for integers that allows us to perform operations without worrying about the sign. That is a big help at the implementation level.

Similarly we have so many floating point operations and yet we rely on sign and magnitude. What is the reason?

Why can't a 2's complement like system work for floats?

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