this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2026
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Funny meme, never got why they used a bias instead of two's complement for the exponent though
they could have used two’s complement for the exponent, but the biased exponent is objectively a better encoding for what floating point hardware needs to do.
This is paraphrased like mad, but basically that means hardware can compare exponent fields as plain unsigned integers. With twos complement, unsigned comparison says 255 > 1, even though -1 < 1. So every comparison would need special signed comparison logic.
Gotcha, very cool!