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The register width of a processor determines the range of values that can be represented in its registers. Though the vast majority of computers can perform multiple-precision arithmetic on operands in memory, allowing numbers to be arbitrarily long and overflow to be avoided, the register width limits the sizes of numbers that can be operated on (e.g., added or subtracted) using a single ...
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.
Some programming languages such as Lisp, Python, Perl, Haskell, Ruby and Raku use, or have an option to use, arbitrary-precision numbers for all integer arithmetic. Although this reduces performance, it eliminates the possibility of incorrect results (or exceptions) due to simple overflow.
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.
In the floating-point case, a variable exponent would represent the power of ten to which the mantissa of the number is multiplied. Languages that support a rational data type usually allow the construction of such a value from two integers, instead of a base-2 floating-point number, due to the loss of exactness the latter would cause.
One with a binary integer significand field encodes the significand as a large binary integer between 0 and 10 p −1. This is expected to be more convenient for software implementations using a binary ALU. Another with a densely packed decimal significand field encodes decimal digits more directly. This makes conversion to and from binary ...
In computer science, type safety and type soundness are the extent to which a programming language discourages or prevents type errors.Type safety is sometimes alternatively considered to be a property of facilities of a computer language; that is, some facilities are type-safe and their usage will not result in type errors, while other facilities in the same language may be type-unsafe and a ...
This alternative definition is significantly more widespread: machine epsilon is the difference between 1 and the next larger floating point number.This definition is used in language constants in Ada, C, C++, Fortran, MATLAB, Mathematica, Octave, Pascal, Python and Rust etc., and defined in textbooks like «Numerical Recipes» by Press et al.