| IEEE Floating Point Standard | Computing | IEEE Floating Point Standard (IEEE 754) "IEEE Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic (ANSI/IEEE Std 754-1985)" or IEC 559: "Binary floating-point arithmetic for microprocessor systems". A standard, used by many CPUs and FPUs, which defines formats for representing floating-point numbers; representations of special values (e.g.infinity, very small values, NaN); five exceptions, when they occur, and what happens when they do occur; four rounding modes; and a set of floating-point operations that will work identically on any conforming system. IEEE 754 specifies four formats for representing floating-point values: single-precision (32-bit), double-precision (64-bit), single-extended precision (80-bit?) and double-extended precision (128-bit). Only 32-bit values are required by the standard, the others are optional though 64-bit is required by standard C. [On-line document?] (1997-12-19). Source: The Free On-line Dictionary of Computing.. |
