What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating Point Arithmetic (1991)

Quote from this nice article: "Floating-point arithmetic is considered as esoteric subject by many people. This is rather surprising, because floating-point is ubiquitous in computer systems: Almost every language has a floating-point datatype; computers from PCs to supercomputers have floating-point accelerators; most compilers will be called upon to compile floating-point algorithms from time to time; and virtually every operating system must respond to floating-point exceptions such as overflow. This paper presents a tutorial on the aspects of floating-point that have a direct impact on designers of computer systems. It begins with background on floating-point representation and rounding error, continues with a discussion of the IEEE floating point standard, and concludes with examples of how computer system builders can better support floating point. "

floating point, datatypes, compilers, super computers

Relevante links:

1. http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.22.6768
2. --

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