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Floating point operations

Extended-precision

Extended-precision floating point numbers have the following format on the Intel386(TM) microprocessor:

79 78 64 63 0
SIGN EXPONENT FRACTION
      ^  
      binary point  
For extended precision, bit 63 is always a 1, and the decimal point comes after this bit. The other formats have an implicit bit 1 before the fraction, as explained in ``Normalized numbers''.

Field Position Full name
sign 79 sign bit (0==positive, 1==negative)
exponent 78-64 exponent (biased by 16,383)
fraction 63-0 fraction (bit 63=1, followed by the
    decimal point. Bits 62-0 are the fraction.


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