18 upvotes, 1 direct replies (showing 1)
16,777,216 is the maximum value that can be stored in a 24-bit mantissa
An IEEE 754 single‑precision float has 23 explicit bits for the significand (mantissa) plus an implicit leading 1, giving a total of 24 bits of precision.
This means that all integers up to 224=16,777,2162^{24} = 16,777,216224=16,777,216 can be represented exactly.
tl;dr this is probably a placeholder value, or a bug (of course!)
Comment by nosfyt at 23/01/2025 at 00:54 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
You remind me of my low level programming teacher.
And you reminded me of how he forced us to do bit conversions by hand.
So now i hate you... (not really)