On a tapered floating point system

R. Morris (see IEEE Trans. Comput., vol.TC-20, p.1578-9, 1971), suggested adding an extra field to the fixed floating point system, so that exponents can be stored more efficiently. The exponents are stored in the smallest possible space, passing the extra bits to the mantissa. The extra field is used to monitor the current length of the exponent. The gain in precision and/or exponent range outweighs the overhead of the extra field and the processing speed. The authors provide implementation details, error analysis, and some future research ideas. Simulation results are provided for comparison purposes