Comment by Sirenos

Sorry, I didn't mean to downplay the value of using concrete examples. I absolutely agree that everyone learns better from concrete settings, which is why my original comment fixed the parameters for people to play with. I was referring more to the discussions of how exponents are stored biased, the leading bit in the mantissa is implied = 1 (except for subnormals), and so on. All these are distracting features that can (and should) be covered once the reader has a strong intuition of the more fundamental aspects.