(from comp.arch) rounding vs. chopping example from Nelson Beebe

[uunet!cwi.nl!dik]

 > As for the first IBM RS/6000 implementation, I have heard that the original
 > floating-point unit was designed to implement IBM 370 arithmetic, and was
 > changed to IEEE 754 format relatively late in the game.  If true then it
 > would not be surprising that some aspects of 754 were problematic to add in.
In the current implementation the internals are still in hex.