Although it’s tempting to think that computers can do anything, they are not without their limitations. For example, computers’ limited memory makes them unable to compute real numbers. So, when a ...

Floating-point arithmetic provides a practical means of representing real numbers on digital computers by encoding them in a finite number of bits for sign, exponent and significand. The IEEE-754 ...

An unfortunate reality of trying to represent continuous real numbers in a fixed space (e.g. with a limited number of bits) is that this comes with an inevitable loss of both precision and accuracy.

On February 25, 1991, during the eve of the of an Iraqi invasion of Saudi Arabia, a Scud missile fired from Iraqi positions hit a US Army barracks in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia. A defense was available – ...

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American Last month, I wrote about the hype ...

Hardware for integer or fixed-point arithmetic is relatively simple to design, at least at the register-transfer level. If the range of values and precision that can be represented with these formats ...

A way to represent very large and very small numbers using the same quantity of numeric positions. Floating point also enables calculating a wide range of numbers very quickly. Although floating point ...

In 1985, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) established IEEE 754, a standard for floating point formats and arithmetic that would become the model for practically all FP ...

Embedded C and C++ programmers are familiar with signed and unsigned integers and floating-point values of various sizes, but a number of numerical formats can be used in embedded applications. Here ...