Comment by teleforce 8 days ago
Fun facts, according to Jobs for some unknown reasons Wozniak refused to add floating point support to Apple Basic thus they had to license BASIC with floating point numbers from Microsoft [1].
[1] Bill & Steve (Jobs!) reminisce about floating point BASIC:
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/vbteam/bill-steve-jobs-remini...
The thing is, Woz already wrote floating point routines which were included in the Apple II ROMs themselves that you could call with PEEK/POKE. They just were never integrated into the BASIC language itself!
http://retro.hansotten.nl/uploads/mag6502/Apples%20Hidden%20...
I did learn how to program on the -10. A marvelous experience.
Looking backwards, writing an integer basic is a trivial exercise. But back in the 70s, I had no idea how to write such a thing.
Around 1978, Hal Finney (yes, that guy) wrote an integer basic for the Mattel Intellivision (with its wacky 10 bit microprocessor) that fit in a 2K EPROM. Of course, Hal was (a lot) smarter than the average bear.
Interesting, I didn't know that! I didn't know him until the 90s, and didn't meet him in person until his CodeCon presentation.
What I was trying to express—perhaps poorly—is that maybe floating-point support would have been more effort than the entire Integer BASIC. (Incidentally, as I understand it, nobody has found a bug in Apple Integer BASIC yet, which makes it a nontrivial achievement from my point of view.)
Fixed point is where the number has a predetermined number of bits for the integer and fraction like 8.8 where you have 0-255 for the integer and the fraction goes from 1/256 to 255/256 in steps of 1/256
Floating point at it's simplest just makes that a variable. So the (.) position is stored as a separate number. Now instead of being fixed - it floats around.
This way you can put more in the integer or more in the fraction.
The Microsoft Basic here used 23 bits for the number, 1 sign bit and 8 bits to say where the floating point should be placed.
Of course in practice you have to deal with a lot of details depending on how robust you want your system. This Basic was not as robost as modern IEEE754 but it did the job.
Reading more about IEE754 is a fascinating way to learn about modern floating point. I also recommend Bruce Dawson's observations on his Random ASCII blog.
Let's say we want to store numbers in computer memory but we are not allowed to use decimal point or any characters except for digits. We need to make some system to encode and decode real numbers as a sequence containing only digits.
With fixed point numbers, you write the digits into the memory and have a convention that the decimal point is always after N-th digit. For example, if we agree that the point is always after 2-nd digit then a string 000123 is interpreted as 00.0123 and 123000 means 1230. Using this system with 6 digits we can represent numbers from 0 to 9999 to precision of 0.01.
With floating point, you write both decimal point position (which we call "exponent") and digits (called "mantissa"). Let's agree that the first two digits are the exponent (point position) and the rest four is mantissa. Then this number:
020123
That's all you need to know, and the rest should be easy to figure out.
In other words, a floating point number consists of 2 numbers and a sign bit:
1. the digits
2. the exponent
3. a sign bit
If you're familiar with scientific notation, yes, it's the same thing.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_notation
The rest is just the inevitable consequences of that.
The specs for it are indeed hard to read. But the implementation isn't that bad. Things like the sticky bit and the guard bit are actually pretty simple.
However, crafting an algorithm that uses IEEE arithmetic and avoids the limitations of IEEE is hard.
If you want a crash course in the mechanics of FP math, i.e. how it’s done at the bit level, then head over to the Project Oberon site and look for the PDF describing the implementation of their RISC machine in FPGA.
Chapter 16, pages 8-10, gives a very concise description of the process.
Floating point math was a key feature on these early machines, since it opened up the "glorified desk calculator" use case. This was one use for them (along with gaming and use as a remote terminal) that did not require convenient data storage, which would've been a real challenge before disk drives became a standard. And the float implementation included in BASIC was the most common back in the day. (There are even some subtle differences between it and the modern IEEE variety that we'd be familiar with today.)
Writing a floating point emulator (I've done it) is not too hard. First, write it in a high level language, and debug the algorithm. Then hand-assembling it is not hard.
What is hard is skipping the high level language step, and trying to do it in assembler in one step.