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Go: the standard library package math/big implements arbitrary-precision integers (Int type), rational numbers (Rat type), and floating-point numbers (Float type) Guile: the built-in exact numbers are of arbitrary precision. Example: (expt 10 100) produces the expected (large) result. Exact numbers also include rationals, so (/ 3 4) produces 3/4.
Huberto M. Sierra noted in his 1956 patent "Floating Decimal Point Arithmetic Control Means for Calculator": [1] Thus under some conditions, the major portion of the significant data digits may lie beyond the capacity of the registers.
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.
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 ...
IEEE 754 specifies additional floating-point formats, including 32-bit base-2 single precision and, more recently, base-10 representations (decimal floating point). One of the first programming languages to provide floating-point data types was Fortran.
The "decimal" data type of the C# and Python programming languages, and the decimal formats of the IEEE 754-2008 standard, are designed to avoid the problems of binary floating-point representations when applied to human-entered exact decimal values, and make the arithmetic always behave as expected when numbers are printed in decimal.
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 ...
Round-to-nearest: () is set to the nearest floating-point number to . When there is a tie, the floating-point number whose last stored digit is even (also, the last digit, in binary form, is equal to 0) is used.