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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.
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.
Conversely, precision can be lost when converting representations from integer to floating-point, since a floating-point type may be unable to exactly represent all possible values of some integer type. For example, float might be an IEEE 754 single precision type, which cannot represent the integer 16777217 exactly, while a 32-bit integer type ...
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.
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 ...
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.
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 ...
Lastly we have the problem wherein the storage of the floating point data may be in big endian or little endian memory order and thus the sign bit could be in the least significant byte or the most significant byte. Therefore the use of type punning with floating point data is a questionable method with unpredictable results.