Abstract
We live in a world of floating-point numbers and we make frequent use of floating-point numbers when working with computers. In this chapter we dive deeply into how floating-point numbers are represented in a computer. We briefly review the distinction between real numbers and floating-point numbers. Then comes a brief historical look at the development of floating-point numbers. After this we compare two popular floating-point representations and then focus exclusively on the IEEE 754 standard. For IEEE 754 we consider representation, rounding, arithmetic, exception handling, and hardware implementations. We conclude the chapter with some comments about the pitfalls associated with using floating-point numbers.
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Kneusel, R.T. (2015). Floating Point. In: Numbers and Computers. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17260-6_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-17260-6_3
Publisher Name: Springer, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-17259-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-17260-6
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