Floating point arithmetic: number formats, instruction sets, software and hardware implementations.
Questions tagged [floating-point]
58 questions
9
votes
1 answer
How robust was floating point format output in pre-IEEE systems?
Most pre-IEEE floating point formats that used biased exponent and a 2's-complement mantissa without a hidden bit, were asymmetric. That is, there was a representable negative value which had no positive equivalent, analogous to 0x80000000 in 32-bit…
Leo B.
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Did any early computers use a different radix to improve accuracy of rational arithmetic?
Fractions like a third, a fifth, a tenth and so on cannot be precisely represented in binary, because those would be recurring fractions and so would never fit in a (reasonable) data structure. And some fractions like a third, while impossible to…
Omar and Lorraine
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