At 01:02 PM 3/26/2017, Gareth McCaughan wrote: This has the drawback that essentially no integers other than
0 and +-1 are *exactly* represented, unless I'm missing something. I'm not sure how much that matters, but it would be quite a departure from conventional floating-point representations.
I'm not so sure that anyone cares about this anymore. I may have been one of the few people trying to do integer calculations using a floating point unit: January 1992 http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/AB-mod-N.html http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/AB-mod-N.pdf "We show how to compute A*B (mod N) efficiently, for single-precision A,B, and N, on a modern RISC architecture (Intel 80860) in ANSI C. On this architecture, our method computes A*B (mod N) faster than ANSI C computes A%N, for unsigned longs A and N."