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The largest representable value for a fixed-size integer variable may be exceeded even for relatively small arguments as shown in the table below. Even floating-point numbers are soon outranged, so it may help to recast the calculations in terms of the logarithm of the number.
Standard ML: The optional built-in IntInf structure implements the INTEGER signature and supports arbitrary-precision integers. Tcl: As of version 8.5 (2007), integers are arbitrary-precision by default. (Behind the scenes, the language switches to using an arbitrary-precision internal representation for integers too large to fit in a machine word.
The representation has a limited precision. For example, only 15 decimal digits can be represented with a 64-bit real. If a very small floating-point number is added to a large one, the result is just the large one. The small number was too small to even show up in 15 or 16 digits of resolution, and the computer effectively discards it.
Conversion of the fractional part: Consider 0.375, the fractional part of 12.375. To convert it into a binary fraction, multiply the fraction by 2, take the integer part and repeat with the new fraction by 2 until a fraction of zero is found or until the precision limit is reached which is 23 fraction digits for IEEE 754 binary32 format.
The instructions to convert between floating-point and integer values in the optional floating-point processor of the PDP-11/45, PDP-11/70, and in some later processors, stored 32-bit "double precision integer long" values with the 16-bit halves swapped from the expected little-endian order.
Variable length arithmetic represents numbers as a string of digits of a variable's length limited only by the memory available. Variable-length arithmetic operations are considerably slower than fixed-length format floating-point instructions.
The hardware to manipulate these representations is less costly than floating point, and it can be used to perform normal integer operations, too. Binary fixed point is usually used in special-purpose applications on embedded processors that can only do integer arithmetic, but decimal fixed point is common in commercial applications.
The number 4,294,967,295, equivalent to the hexadecimal value FFFFFFFF 16, is the maximum value for a 32-bit unsigned integer in computing. [6] It is therefore the maximum value for a variable declared as an unsigned integer (usually indicated by the unsigned codeword) in many programming languages running on modern computers.