Floating Point Complexities
Operations are somewhat more complicated (see text)
In addition to overflow we can have “underflow”
Accuracy can be a big problem
- IEEE 754 keeps two extra bits, guard and round
- four rounding modes
- positive divided by zero yields “infinity”
- zero divide by zero yields “not a number”
- other complexities
Implementing the standard can be tricky
Not using the standard can be even worse
- see text for description of 80x86 and Pentium bug!