Quiz submission record for quiz3-2-1 at Tue Jul  6 23:55:26 2004:

Your Answer for Question 1:
One can make a virus that looks like a harmless piece of data. But once it is downloaded, the virus actually contains executable pieces of codes (since data can be anything, i.e., it's difficult to identify whether a piece of machine codes is data or instrutions).


Your Answer for Question 2:
subnormal is denormalized numbers. They have the same exponent as zero but a nonzero significand. They allow a number to degrade in significance until it becomes 0, called gradual underflow.

Your Answer for Question 3:
The major difference between computer number and number in the real world is that computer numbers have limited sizes hence limited precision.  Therefore, in the old days, many programmers wrote (0.5 - x) + 0.5
instead of 1.0 - x to be more PRECISE.

Your Answer for Question 4:
We want a floating point representation that could be easily processed by integers comparison, especially for sortings.  
The IEEE 754 used biased notation with the bias being the number subtracted from the normal.The


Your unique submission ID is quiz3-2-1-cs61c-cb-1089183326-1891.