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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 ...
Although saturation arithmetic is less popular for integer arithmetic in hardware, the IEEE floating-point standard, the most popular abstraction for dealing with approximate real numbers, uses a form of saturation in which overflow is converted into "infinity" or "negative infinity", and any other operation on this result continues to produce ...
The overflow flag is thus set when the most significant bit (here considered the sign bit) is changed by adding two numbers with the same sign (or subtracting two numbers with opposite signs). Overflow cannot occur when the sign of two addition operands are different (or the sign of two subtraction operands are the same). [1]
On 5 January 1975, the 12-bit field that had been used for dates in the TOPS-10 operating system for DEC PDP-10 computers overflowed, in a bug known as "DATE75". The field value was calculated by taking the number of years since 1964, multiplying by 12, adding the number of months since January, multiplying by 31, and adding the number of days since the start of the month; putting 2 12 − 1 ...
Arbitrary-precision arithmetic can also be used to avoid overflow, which is an inherent limitation of fixed-precision arithmetic. Similar to an automobile's odometer display which may change from 99999 to 00000, a fixed-precision integer may exhibit wraparound if numbers grow too large to represent at the fixed level of precision.
The same carry bit is also generally used to indicate borrows in subtraction, though the bit's meaning is inverted due to the effects of two's complement arithmetic. Normally, a carry bit value of "1" signifies that an addition overflowed the ALU, and must be accounted for when adding data words of lengths greater than that of the CPU. For ...
arithmetic formats: sets of binary and decimal floating-point data, which consist of finite numbers (including signed zeros and subnormal numbers), infinities, and special "not a number" values ; interchange formats: encodings (bit strings) that may be used to exchange floating-point data in an efficient and compact form
When implemented in software, long multiplication algorithms must deal with overflow during additions, which can be expensive. A typical solution is to represent the number in a small base, b, such that, for example, 8b is a representable machine integer. Several additions can then be performed before an overflow occurs.