Uses of \"float:16\" ?

[VLD/VMB]

Several years ago, there was a very nice article on variable-
precision floating point representation.  I think it was by
Leslie Lamport and published in CACM, but my memory is fuzzy.
The idea was, with a given number of bits, as the exponent
became larger (in absolute value), bits were stolen from the
mantissa.  This gave maximum significance around 1.0 and
permitted a much wider dynamic range than usual.  One might
think that arithmetic on such critters would be horribly
complicated, but in fact it was not much worse than usual and
perhaps even somewhat better for addition/subtraction.