What is the purpose of Excess-K representation?

Question

What is the purpose of excess-k when representing binary floating point binary numbers. I came across this in my computer systems course and I can't figure out the advantage of offsetting the numbers by K value.

Answer 1

A simple search turns up this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Offset_binary

To quote:

"Offset binary,[1] also referred to as excess-K,[1] excess-N, excess code or biased representation, is a digital coding scheme where all-zero corresponds to the minimal negative value and all-one to the maximal positive value. There is no standard for offset binary, but most often the offset K for an n-bit binary word is K = 2n−1. This has the consequence that the "zero" value is represented by a 1 in the most significant bit and zero in all other bits, and in general the effect is conveniently the same as using two's complement except that the most significant bit is inverted. It also has the consequence that in a logical comparison operation, one gets the same result as with a two's complement numerical comparison operation, whereas, in two's complement notation a logical comparison will agree with two's complement numerical comparison operation if and only if the numbers being compared have the same sign. Otherwise the sense of the comparison will be inverted, with all negative values being taken as being larger than all positive values."