Decimal to binary conversion

[Tim Peters]

> In IEEE-754, 5.6 Binary <-> Decimal Conversion, the sentence "On input,
> trailing zeros shall be appended to or stripped from M (up to the
> limits specified in Table 2) so as to minimize N."  appears.  What is
> the sense of "minimize N"?  Is it closest to zero, or closest to
> -infinity?

Since N is non-negative, there's no ambiguity (i.e., "to 0" and "to -inf"
are the same).

It takes (just) a little imagination to infer the "N is non-negative"
constraint from the 754 text.  The corresponding section of IEEE-854 is
explicit about this, so read that too for clarification.

interpretingly y'rs  - tim

Tim Peters   timaksr.com
not speaking for Kendall Square Research Corp