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Comment by dzaima

2 days ago

As long as you want all bit patterns to be Some float, there's not really one bit pattern you can chop out of somewhere (or, three, rather - both infinities, and NaN).

Taking, say, the 3 smallest subnormal numbers, or the three largest numbers, or whatever, would be extremely bad for allowing optimizations/algorithms/correctness checkers to reason about operations in the abstract.