Quiz submission record for quiz3-2-1 at Tue Jul  6 19:30:59 2004:

Your Answer for Question 1:
Someone can put instructions in something that's supposed to be data.  So the user thinks he's opening an mp3 file but he's actually executing instructions to delete files.

You could probably waste a few bits to have some sort of security tag, but that's stupid because you're wasting bits and you're wasting cpu cycles.

Your Answer for Question 2:
A subnormal is a number that fills in the gap around zero for floating point numbers.  Subnormals have lower precision to get a larger range of numbers.

Your Answer for Question 3:
For some reason, there was a lack of a guard bit in some machine and using (0.5 - x) + 0.5 instead of 1.0 - x compensated for the lack of that guard bit.  Why?  I don't know.  It was some bug.

Your Answer for Question 4:
For: IEEE 754 has been around for a long time and debating pros and cons of each implementation has already been done.  Even if I come up with a super duper standard, I have to get the whole community to change.

Against: It doesn't balance language and compiler issues.  People who write compilers hate IEEE 754.  


Your unique submission ID is quiz3-2-1-cs61c-ej-1089167459-164.