Talk:Microsoft Binary Format

Computing C‑class Mid‑importance

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What is still missing

Important dates:

Done 1975 = First release of Altair BASIC with (now MBF) floating point by Monte Davidoff who had some experience writing floating point routines

Done 1978 = TRS-80 Level II BASIC introduces double precision

Done 1980 = Intel 8087 with (now IEEE) floating point by William Kahan

Done 1985 = IEEE standard published

1987 = QuickBASIC 4.00 (with IEEE floating point)

1991 = Visual Basic 1.0 (maybe not as important)

Conceptual:

Done Why is IEEE different? Try to motivate existence of NaNs, infs, denormals, different exponent size.

Done Why was it important for Altair BASIC to have floating point routines?

Why did Microsoft switch to IEEE after the standard was published, rather than sticking to MBF? (Interoperability, speed)

How would using these floating point numbers work from the user's perspective? What would you type, what would display?

What could you do with these floating point numbers?

Done Did other software support MBF numbers? (MASM comes to mind; Multiplan for the Tandy 200 notably didn't, it used BCD)

Niceties:

A few examples could be enlightening, for example a few simple numbers and the corresponding bytes, a BASIC session demonstrating their use, anything to make it all a bit more grounded. It's a bit abstract as it stands.

Nicer looking diagrams.

— Preceding unsigned comment added by 82.139.82.82 (talk) 01:37, 2 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

More potential To-Dos:

Check the number of decimal digits supported by the 40-bit and 64-bit formats. (Some sources state that the 40-bit format supports 9 digits, but it could also be an 8-digit format only.)
The references should be converted into the Template:Cite format and various parameters added.

--Matthiaspaul (talk) 22:56, 31 January 2016 (UTC)[reply]

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