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This does not violate trichotomy as long as a consistent total order is adopted: either −0 = +0 or −0 < +0 is valid. Common floating point types, however, have an exception to trichotomy: there is a special value "NaN" (Not a Number) such that x < NaN, x > NaN, and x = NaN are all false for all floating-point values x (including NaN itself).
Python supports normal floating point numbers, which are created when a dot is used in a literal (e.g. 1.1), when an integer and a floating point number are used in an expression, or as a result of some mathematical operations ("true division" via the / operator, or exponentiation with a negative exponent).
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.
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.
A decimal data type could be implemented as either a floating-point number or as a fixed-point number. In the fixed-point case, the denominator would be set to a fixed power of ten. In the floating-point case, a variable exponent would represent the power of ten to which the mantissa of the number is multiplied.
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 ...
In computing, the modulo operation returns the remainder or signed remainder of a division, after one number is divided by another, called the modulus of the operation.. Given two positive numbers a and n, a modulo n (often abbreviated as a mod n) is the remainder of the Euclidean division of a by n, where a is the dividend and n is the divisor.
The following complexity figures assume that arithmetic with individual elements has complexity O(1), as is the case with fixed-precision floating-point arithmetic or operations on a finite field. Operation