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In practice, most floating-point systems use base two, though base ten (decimal floating point) is also common. Floating-point arithmetic operations, such as addition and division, approximate the corresponding real number arithmetic operations by rounding any result that is not a floating-point number itself to a nearby floating-point number.
Some computer languages have implementations of decimal floating-point arithmetic, including PL/I, .NET, [3] emacs with calc, and Python's decimal module. [4] In 1987, the IEEE released IEEE 854, a standard for computing with decimal floating point, which lacked a specification for how floating-point data should be encoded for interchange with ...
To convert a fixed-point number to floating-point, one may convert the integer to floating-point and then divide it by the scaling factor S. This conversion may entail rounding if the integer's absolute value is greater than 2 24 (for binary single-precision IEEE floating point) or of 2 53 (for double-precision).
The IEEE 754 specification—followed by all modern floating-point hardware—requires that the result of an elementary arithmetic operation (addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and square root since 1985, and FMA since 2008) be correctly rounded, which implies that in rounding to nearest, the rounded result is within 0.5 ulp of ...
In the IEEE 754 standard, the 64-bit base-2 format is officially referred to as binary64; it was called double in IEEE 754-1985. IEEE 754 specifies additional floating-point formats, including 32-bit base-2 single precision and, more recently, base-10 representations (decimal floating point).
Conversion to an external character sequence must be such that conversion back using round to nearest, ties to even will recover the original number. There is no requirement to preserve the payload of a quiet NaN or signaling NaN, and conversion from the external character sequence may turn a signaling NaN into a quiet NaN.
Decimal arithmetic, compatible with that used in Java, C#, PL/I, COBOL, Python, REXX, etc., is also defined in this section. In general, decimal arithmetic follows the same rules as binary arithmetic (results are correctly rounded, and so on), with additional rules that define the exponent of a result (more than one is possible in many cases).
However, hardware support for accelerated 16-bit floating point was later dropped by Nvidia before being reintroduced in the Tegra X1 mobile GPU in 2015. The F16C extension in 2012 allows x86 processors to convert half-precision floats to and from single-precision floats with a machine instruction.