Learn to Program with Assembly: Foundational Learning for New Programmers

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to APress Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2021

J. BartlettLearn to Program with Assemblyhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-7437-8_25

Floating-Point Numbers

Jonathan Bartlett¹  

(1)

Tulsa, OK, USA

 

So far, the only numbers we’ve dealt with are integers—numbers with no decimal point. Computers have a general problem with numbers with decimal points, because computers can only store fixed-size, finite values. Decimal numbers can be any length, including infinite length (think of a repeating decimal, like the result of 1/3).

The way a computer handles decimals is by storing them at a fixed precision (number of significant bits). A computer stores decimal numbers in three parts—the sign bit, the exponent, and ...