October 2000
Intermediate to advanced
400 pages
13h 30m
English
Content preview from Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software, First EditionBecome an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
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Chapter 23. Fixed Point, Floating Point
Numbers are numbers, and in most of our daily lives we drift casually between whole numbers, fractions, and percentages. We buy half a carton of eggs and pay 8 ¼ percent sales tax with money earned getting time-and-a-half for working 2 ¾ hours overtime. Most people are fairly comfortable—if not necessarily proficient—with numbers such as these. We can even hear a statistic like “the average American house-hold has 2.6 people” without gasping in horror at the widespread mutilation that must have occurred to achieve this.
Yet this interchange between whole numbers and fractions isn’t so casual when it comes to computer memory. Yes, everything is stored in computers in the form of bits, which means that everything ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.