Quiz submission record for quiz3-2-1 at Tue Jul  6 23:21:43 2004:

Your Answer for Question 1:
If everything is represented as data, then that means that everything can be altered.  Therefore, I could potentially write a program that could change the instructions that I am passing to the computer, simply by loading new values into the memory where I have instructions.  This could be prevented by perhaps declaring certain segments of memory "read-only," but to do this through hardware would limit the size of programs that could be written, or we would be forced to use other hardware, which would complicate hardware design.

Your Answer for Question 2:
A subnormal is a way to represent numbers between the smallest normalized floating point number (1.0000... * 10^smallest exponent) and 0.  It does this by not assumign that the values of the significand have a leading one, thus extending the number of powers of two we can represent by the number of digits that can be stored in the significand.  This just allows us to get a more gradual progression to 0, although they are not always implemented in most software.

Your Answer for Question 3:
It had to do with the fact that some old hardware didn't take into account the need for a guard and a round digit.  In this case, the most significant digit is in the digits place, while in the other, the most significant digit is in the tenths place (rather, 2^0, and 2^-1 respectively).  If extra digits for more precise arithmatic were not provided, calculations using the first form could potentially be off by quite a factor, especially if x was a small number.

Your Answer for Question 4:
The strongest argument for conforming to the standard is that it allows backwards compatability.  That way, your program would still produce the desired results when using old architecture.  However, the strongest argument against conforming to the standard is that with new technology, new and better ways of computing can be devised, but there is less freedom to develop new methods  if you need to conform to the regular standards.


Your unique submission ID is quiz3-2-1-cs61c-el-1089181303-218.