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At the least, overflow is addressed:

> nan is also the result of operations that produce results that are too large to be represented.




It's addressed, but in the wrong way. IEEE 754 has positive and negative infinity for a reason. Why do there have to be 255 zero values? Also, what about rounding modes? Floating point math is really, really hard and this specification makes it look too easy.


They want to allow fast "addition with equal exponents" in a single cycle and that requires a zero value for each possible exponent.


I see, that makes sense.




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