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The term floating point refers to the fact that the number's radix point can "float ... (The term "exception" as used in IEEE 754 is a general term meaning an ...
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.
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.
Exception handling in the IEEE 754 floating-point standard refers in general to exceptional conditions and defines an exception as "an event that occurs when an operation on some particular operands has no outcome suitable for every reasonable application. That operation might signal one or more exceptions by invoking the default or, if ...
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.
Since floating-point number system is finite and discrete, it cannot represent all real numbers which means infinite real numbers can only be approximated by some finite numbers through rounding rules. The floating-point approximation of a given real number by () can be denoted.
IEEE 754-2008 (previously known as IEEE 754r) is a revision of the IEEE 754 standard for floating-point arithmetic.It was published in August 2008 and is a significant revision to, and replaces, the IEEE 754-1985 standard.