Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
In 1946, Arthur Burks used the terms mantissa and characteristic to describe the two parts of a floating-point number (Burks [11] et al.) by analogy with the then-prevalent common logarithm tables: the characteristic is the integer part of the logarithm (i.e. the exponent), and the mantissa is the fractional part.
A 2-bit float with 1-bit exponent and 1-bit mantissa would only have 0, 1, Inf, NaN values. If the mantissa is allowed to be 0-bit, a 1-bit float format would have a 1-bit exponent, and the only two values would be 0 and Inf. The exponent must be at least 1 bit or else it no longer makes sense as a float (it would just be a signed number).
MBF numbers consist of an 8-bit base-2 exponent, a sign bit (positive mantissa: s = 0; negative mantissa: s = 1) and a 23-, [43] [8] 31-[8] or 55-bit [43] mantissa of the significand. There is always a 1-bit implied to the left of the explicit mantissa, and the radix point is located before this assumed bit.
On a typical computer system, a double-precision (64-bit) binary floating-point number has a coefficient of 53 bits (including 1 implied bit), an exponent of 11 bits, and 1 sign bit. Since 2 10 = 1024, the complete range of the positive normal floating-point numbers in this format is from 2 −1022 ≈ 2 × 10 −308 to approximately 2 1024 ≈ ...
[3] [4] The word mantissa was introduced by Henry Briggs. [5] For a positive number written in a conventional positional numeral system (such as binary or decimal), its fractional part hence corresponds to the digits appearing after the radix point, such as the decimal point in English. The result is a real number in the half-open interval [0, 1
binary real values are represented in a binary format that includes the mantissa, the base (2, 8, or 16), and the exponent; the special values NaN, -INF, +INF , and negative zero are also supported Multiple valid types ( VisibleString, PrintableString, GeneralString, UniversalString, UTF8String )
Notice that for a binary radix, the leading binary digit is always 1. In a subnormal number, since the exponent is the least that it can be, zero is the leading significant digit (0.m 1 m 2 m 3...m p−2 m p−1), allowing the representation of numbers closer to zero than the smallest normal number. A floating-point number may be recognized as ...
Binary logarithms can be used to calculate the length of the representation of a number in the binary numeral system, or the number of bits needed to encode a message in information theory. In computer science, they count the number of steps needed for binary search and related algorithms.