Report on vintage "Programmer Electronnic Control" alias "RAF Tornado Computer"

[Lyle Bickley]

On Friday 09 March 2007 02:05, Erik Baigar wrote:
> Hi Lyle,
>
> thank you very much for your email.

--snip--

> P.S. > "Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"
>      How do you explain the different sizes of black holes?

Division by zero produces a NaN (Not a Number) - and IEEE 754 NaNs are 
represented with the exponential field filled with ones and some non-zero 
number in the mantissa.

A bit-wise example of a IEEE floating-point standard single precision NaN: 
x11111111axxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx. x = undefined. Therefore, since x is 
undefined, there are many possible valid results - and therefore varying 
sizes of black holes ;-)

Cheers,
Lyle
-- 
Lyle Bickley
Bickley Consulting West Inc.
Mountain View, CA
http://bickleywest.com

"Black holes are where God is dividing by zero"