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The nearest floating-point number with only five digits is 12.346. And 1/3 = 0.3333… is not a floating-point number in base ten with any finite number of digits. In practice, most floating-point systems use base two, though base ten (decimal floating point) is also common.
Additionally, they are frequently encountered as a pedagogical tool in computer-science courses to demonstrate the properties and structures of floating-point arithmetic and IEEE 754 numbers. Minifloats with 16 bits are half-precision numbers (opposed to single and double precision). There are also minifloats with 8 bits or even fewer. [2]
A floating-point variable can represent a wider range of numbers than a fixed-point variable of the same bit width at the cost of precision. A signed 32-bit integer variable has a maximum value of 2 31 − 1 = 2,147,483,647, whereas an IEEE 754 32-bit base-2 floating-point variable has a maximum value of (2 − 2 −23) × 2 127 ≈ 3.4028235 ...
Such floating-point numbers are known as "reals" or "floats" in general, but with a number of variations: A 32-bit float value is sometimes called a "real32" or a "single", meaning "single-precision floating-point value". A 64-bit float is sometimes called a "real64" or a "double", meaning "double-precision floating-point value".
The magnitude of the smallest normal number in a format is given by: b E min {\displaystyle b^{E_{\text{min}}}} where b is the base (radix) of the format (like common values 2 or 10, for binary and decimal number systems), and E min {\textstyle E_{\text{min}}} depends on the size and layout of the format.
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 ...
IEEE 754-1985 [1] is a historic industry standard for representing floating-point numbers in computers, officially adopted in 1985 and superseded in 2008 by IEEE 754-2008, and then again in 2019 by minor revision IEEE 754-2019. [2] During its 23 years, it was the most widely used format for floating-point computation.
For example, while a fixed-point representation that allocates 8 decimal digits and 2 decimal places can represent the numbers 123456.78, 8765.43, 123.00, and so on, a floating-point representation with 8 decimal digits could also represent 1.2345678, 1234567.8, 0.000012345678, 12345678000000000, and so on.