Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
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.
Round-to-nearest: () is set to the nearest floating-point number to . When there is a tie, the floating-point number whose last stored digit is even (also, the last digit, in binary form, is equal to 0) is used.
Floating-point operations other than ordered comparisons normally propagate a quiet NaN (qNaN). Most floating-point operations on a signaling NaN ( sNaN ) signal the invalid-operation exception ; the default exception action is then the same as for qNaN operands and they produce a qNaN if producing a floating-point result.
A floating-point system can be used to represent, with a fixed number of digits, numbers of very different orders of magnitude — such as the number of meters between galaxies or between protons in an atom. For this reason, floating-point arithmetic is often used to allow very small and very large real numbers that require fast processing times.
The IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic (IEEE 754) is a technical standard for floating-point arithmetic originally established in 1985 by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The standard addressed many problems found in the diverse floating-point implementations that made them difficult to use reliably and ...
Some operations of floating-point arithmetic are invalid, such as taking the square root of a negative number. The act of reaching an invalid result is called a floating-point exception. An exceptional result is represented by a special code called a NaN, for "Not a Number". All NaNs in IEEE 754-1985 have this format: sign = either 0 or 1.
C99 adds several functions and types for fine-grained control of floating-point environment. [3] These functions can be used to control a variety of settings that affect floating-point computations, for example, the rounding mode, on what conditions exceptions occur, when numbers are flushed to zero, etc.
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 ...