Floating Point

From Wikibooks, the open-content textbooks collection

Jump to: navigation, search

Floating Point

This book is intended for readers at the Advanced level.

This book requires Discrete Mathematics as a prerequisite.

1 Introduction
2 Table of Contents
3 Further Reading

[edit] Introduction

This wikibooks is going to discuss the IEEE 754 standard concerning floating-point numbers. Beginning chapters of this book will focus on newcomers to the standard, who wish to understand and make use of floating point numbers, especially in a programming project. Later chapters of this book, however, will focus more on the details of implementation of the IEEE 754 standard. This way, advanced users who want more details, or users who are working to create a floating-point implementation of their own can find the information they need. This book will be used as an ancillary reference source to support other books on the CS and Engineering bookshelf.

Programming examples found in this book will attempt to use pseudocode where possible, to prevent an over-reliance on any particular language or platform. Specific examples may utilize a single computer language or assembly language.

Prerequisites to this book include an understanding of exponents and Algebra, and an understanding of binary number representation.

This book is in an early state of development, and any contributions would be welcome and helpful.