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Computing Real Number Trade-Off Precision Significant Digits Significand Exponent

Floating point representation in computing approximates real numbers with a fixed number of significant digits and an exponent, allowing a tradeoff between numerical range and precision. A number can be represented exactly as the product of an integer significand and an integer base to an integer exponent, such as significand × baseexponent. Floating point allows approximations of real numbers in computing.

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Arun Gopinath
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50 views1 page

Computing Real Number Trade-Off Precision Significant Digits Significand Exponent

Floating point representation in computing approximates real numbers with a fixed number of significant digits and an exponent, allowing a tradeoff between numerical range and precision. A number can be represented exactly as the product of an integer significand and an integer base to an integer exponent, such as significand × baseexponent. Floating point allows approximations of real numbers in computing.

Uploaded by

Arun Gopinath
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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In computing, floating point is the formulaic representation that approximates a real number so as

to support a trade-off between range and precision. A number is, in general, represented
approximately to a fixed number of significant digits (the significand) and scaled using
an exponent in some fixed base; the base for the scaling is normally two, ten, or sixteen. A number
that can be represented exactly is of the following form:
where significand is an integer (i.e., in Z), base is an integer greater than or equal to two, and
exponent is also an integer. For example:

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