The maximum value I can have in my calculator is $10^{100}$. At first it seems right but when we consider that the calculator should stores its number as binary, this seems weird.
Why isn't the maximum exponent a base 2 number? Is this limit set manually in the calculator when building it?
Calculator used: Sharp EL-W516X (WriteView)
Best Answer
I don't know about the Sharp in particular, but it's not unusual for calculators to work in base ten internally (actually binary coded decimal, of course).
Among the advantages of doing so are
The main disadvantage relative to binary is that it takes slightly more work to calculate with a given precision. But raw calculation time is not really an issue for simple non-programmable calculators, and the effort saved by binary would be taken up again by needing to do binary-to-decimal conversions whenever you display anything.
Higher-end graphing or programmable calculators will be somewhat more likely to use binary arithmetic for performance.
All that said, it is still pretty likely that you calculator represents the exponent in pure binary internally. Limiting the exponent range to two digits could well have more pragmatic reasons, such as