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  • For native floating-point processors there is no particular reason to align with byte segments since the circuit is designed specifically to the sizes of the bit fields. For the Z80 library it has to adapt to an 8-bit processor. Commented Feb 27 at 23:35
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    I don't think it is feasible to have a FPU without at least 32 bit registers, and it would be trivial for the execution unit(s) to shuffle bits around. I do not see the bus or memory system making any difference, it just needs to move bits around, it would not care what they represent. All the bits needs to be in the register before doing anything anyway. And if you can afford a FPU it makes little sense to couple it to a 8 bit integer unit. Commented Feb 28 at 9:06
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    This question was closed for being "opinion-based", but I don't think this was right; the last paragraph has three questions answerable by factual answers, even if those answers are "no; irrelevant; no because FPUs both at the time and since then have never needed byte-level alignment" Commented Mar 3 at 0:30
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    @petroleus you say that the question isn't opinion-based because the answers can just be "no", but I wrote an answer exactly like that and you complained that you found it unconvincing, so clearly "no" wasn't an adequate answer after all. Commented Mar 27 at 19:17
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    The other interesting facet of the IEEE-754 bit ordering is that they make the values monotonically ordered when interpreted as raw bit patterns. The exponent is more significant than the significand, and the sign bit is most significant of all. If you take two floating-point values, and as long as they're both positive, if you compare their bit patterns as unsigned integers rather than floating point values, you'll still get the right answer. Zero is less than the subnormals are less than the normals are less than Infinity is less than the NaNs. Commented Apr 7 at 12:26