FM> I guess they were writing it in an earlier BASIC. I think I saw
 FM> something to the effect that you tried it in GWBASIC and that
 FM> was indeed the format of their reals.

  Yair... I'm still very confused, but that's a normal learning state
for me.

 BL> $007FFFFF, $00800000, and $ff. WTF does this mean? Are they hex
 BL> numbers

 FM> Yes they are hex numbers, and if you have a non-Turbo Pascal
 FM> reference they may not be mentioned.

  Bloody books. Paul pointed me at the C code, and I see they are hex.
I guessed it anyway, but poor VB doesn't have sfr and shl functions.

 BL> Invalue shr 24 worries me too. That's a hell of a shift right.

 FM> It's sucking out the exponent, the left-most byte of a 4-byte
 FM> number.

  I know bugger-all about binary arithmetic. Me education is lacking.

 FM> then the number is (-1)^S * M * 2^(E-128) and that's what that
 FM> code below calculates.

  I saved all that, and will make sense of it later. Thanks, Frank.

 FM> I think you've now been pointed to the bit of C which
 FM> implements this.

  Not that it helps much. Bloody C! The code is brilliantly simple,
but like all brilliantly simple C code, it is unreadable. It's fun
being a beginner. You learn lots of stuff, and get horribly confused. 

Regards,
Bob
___ Blue Wave/QWK v2.12
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