[omelancon]

> Maybe I misunderstand, but isn't that a similar idea to what I just described? Adding an offset to "rotate" the ranges of the exponent by a segment...

Yes it is similar. It seems to me that there really isn't that many useful operations that can be applied to the exponent beside adding an offset. But that's only a suspicion, do not take my word for it.

> I suspect that ensuring NaN and Infinity are in there will be crucial to avoid performance cliffs...

This is a reasonable assumption. There are in fact ways to rotate and add an offset such that the exponent can overflows/underflows to capture exponents 0 and 0x7ff (for inf and nan) with a single well-positioned tag. Making it work in practice is not as simple, but we are working on it.

[vanderZwan]

Yeah, this is one of those situations where speculating about behavior one thing, but well-designed benchmarks and tests may very well give some surprising results. I am very much looking forward to the follow-up paper where you'll share your results :). Good luck with the research to you and you colleagues!