Chapter 17. Floating-Point
God created the integers,all else is the work of man.
Leopold Kronecker
Operating on floating-point numbers with integer arithmetic and logical instructions is often a messy proposition. This is particularly true for the rules and formats of the IEEE Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic, IEEE Std. 754-2008, commonly known as “IEEE arithmetic.” It has the NaN (not a number) and infinities, which are special cases for almost all operations. It has plus and minus zero, which must compare equal to one another. It has a fourth comparison result, “unordered.” The most significant bit of the fraction is not explicitly present in “normal” numbers, but it is in “subnormal” numbers. The fraction is in signed-true form and the ...
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