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Feature
Floating Numbers
The Problem with Floating-Point Numbers, Part I
Issue: 3.6 (July/August 2005)
Author: William H. Murray and Chris H. Pappas
Author Bio: Murray and Pappas are department chairmen of the Electrical Engineering Technology and Computer Studies programs, respectively, at Broome Community College which is a S.U.N.Y. system college in upstate New York. Murray and Pappas have written over 50 trade books on assembly language, C, C++, C#, Java, Windows, and more.
Article Description: No description available.
Article Length (in bytes): 25,345
Starting Page Number: 22
RBD Number: 3611
Resource File(s):
3611.sit Updated: Monday, July 25, 2005 at 11:26 AM
Related Link(s): None
Known Limitations: None
Excerpt of article text...
You have grown up using generations of computers that allow the use of both integer and real numbers. Integer arithmetic, by its very nature, is precise as long as the computer system can handle the number of bits required to represent the integer results. Real number arithmetic, on the other hand, has the potential of suffering from precision and rounding errors at every turn.
In the mid-80's, the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) and the Institute for Electrical and Electronic Engineers (IEEE) released the ANSI/IEEE 754 floating-point standard. It addresses many of the issues dealing with real numbers and how they might be represented in order to contain precision and rounding errors.
Fortunately for programmers, all modern programming languages -- including REALbasic -- implement this standard in their float-point arithmetic. As long as the compiler developers of a computer language get the implementation of the ANSI/IEEE standard right, the user is completely isolated from the process.
...End of Excerpt. Please purchase the magazine to read the full article.
Article copyrighted by REALbasic Developer magazine. All rights reserved.
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