There is already a prior question dealing with why certain bit-widths were chosen (although I do find it somewhat insufficient, but that's another topic), but what strikes me as unusual is how the bits are distributed rather than anything else. If we are to divide a 32-bit, single-precision floating point number into bytes, we see that the exponent is split across bytes 3 and 4, with one bit in byte 3 and seven in byte 4. There are various "homebrew" floating point libraries around online tar...
