Representation of Floating-Point Numbers

The representation of floating-point numbers is more complex. Most computers use IEEE 754. Here is the single precision bit layout: 

  1     8               23              width in bits
 +-+--------+-----------------------+
 |S|  Exp   |  Fraction             |
 +-+--------+-----------------------+
 31 30    23 22                    0    bit index (0 on right)
    bias +127
COMP1721 won't full explore floating point representation. For much more see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_floating-point_standard

Index