Keep in mind on most systems, floating point binary uses 2's compliment and has a sign bit
Hummmm that probably explains why the anwser was -5.4375 (If you looksee, theres this little - symbol in frount of the numbers, thats for the sign, in this case negative)
Do you happen to know exactly what "IEEE single-precision floating point number" means? Cos Ive forgotten, why dont you post the definition? That would be helpfull