internal number representation

[retoa]

Hello all,

I still have some question about the internal representation of real numbers in the Prime.

there is (in BCD):

1 nibble for the sign (4 bits)
12 nibbles for the mantissa
3 nibbles for the signed exponent

How is the sign represented within the 4 sign bits? What can these 4 bits represent (+ infinity, -infinity, ...) and how will it be done?

How is the signed exponent represented within the 3 BCD nibbles? Is it shifted by 499, so -499 will be 000, 0 will be 499 and +499 will be 998?

Is it possible to have a detailed description of the significance of the various bits?

Is there a way to see the internal binary representation of a real number (something like casting a real to a longint)?

Thank you very much for the help, I want to explain it to my students, but I'm not sure about how it will be done and don't want to expose it wrong.

Reto