Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
dc: "Desktop Calculator" arbitrary-precision RPN calculator that comes standard on most Unix-like systems. KCalc, Linux based scientific calculator; Maxima: a computer algebra system which bignum integers are directly inherited from its implementation language Common Lisp. In addition, it supports arbitrary-precision floating-point numbers ...
A decimal floating-point number can be encoded in several ways, the different ways represent different precisions, for example 100.0 is encoded as 1000×10 −1, while 100.00 is encoded as 10000×10 −2. The set of possible encodings of the same numerical value is called a cohort in the standard. If the result of a calculation is inexact the ...
Similar binary floating-point formats can be defined for computers. There is a number of such schemes, the most popular has been defined by Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). The IEEE 754-2008 standard specification defines a 64 bit floating-point format with: an 11-bit binary exponent, using "excess-1023" format.
For floating-point arithmetic, the mantissa was restricted to a hundred digits or fewer, and the exponent was restricted to two digits only. The largest memory supplied offered 60 000 digits, however Fortran compilers for the 1620 settled on fixed sizes such as 10, though it could be specified on a control card if the default was not satisfactory.
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 ...
The advantage of decimal floating-point representation over decimal fixed-point and integer representation is that it supports a much wider range of values. 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 ...
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 number 0.15625 represented as a single-precision IEEE 754-1985 floating-point number. See text for explanation. The three fields in a 64bit IEEE 754 float. Floating-point numbers in IEEE 754 format consist of three fields: a sign bit, a biased exponent, and a fraction. The following example illustrates the meaning of each.