Extracting bit fields from an IEEE-784 float

[Roy Smith]

In article <jv64v5$g2n$2 at reader1.panix.com>,
 Grant Edwards <invalid at invalid.invalid> wrote:

> The last ones I worked on that where the FP format wasn't IEEE were
> the DEC VAX 

According to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vax#History, the last VAX was 
produced 7 years ago.  I'm sure there's still more than a few chugging 
away in corporate data centers and manufacturing floors, but as an 
architecture, it's pretty much a dead parrot.

IEEE floating point is as near to a universal standard as it gets in the 
computer world.  About the only thing that has it beat for market 
penetration and longevity are 2's complement integers and 8-bit bytes.