[9fans] plan 9 floating point representation

[hugo rivera <uair00@gmail.com>]

Hi,
I am learning a bit about floating point representation and I am
wondering about how plan 9 does this.
According to IEEE 754 (I think) the convention used by C for single
precision floating point numbers is to use 24 of the 32 bits available
for the significand and 8 bits for the exponent. It seems to me that
plan 9 follows this convention but I am still kind of puzzled about
the base of the exponent. I've been experimenting (on a 386) a while
and it looks like a base 4 to me, which is kind of strange, since I
was expecting a base 2 or 10. I think I got something wrong, but I
would appreciate if someone can explain this to me to have a better
idea of how this works. It looks to me that this stuff is very machine
dependent (or language?), is it?
The point of all this is to classify raw data (4 byte length)
according to their magnitude, I don't really care about the
significant. This is just an exercise for me, since there are other
easier ways to do it.

Saludos
--
Hugo