Generic selectors
Exact matches only
Search in title
Search in content
Post Type Selectors

Explain the basic format used to represent floating point numbers.

The floating point representation has three fields :

  1. The sign bit : The sign bit determines whether the number is negative or positive. 0 denotes a positive number and 1 denotes a negative number.
  2. The exponent : The exponent field needs to represent both positive and negative exponents. To do this, a bias is added to the actual exponent in order to get the stored exponent. For IEEE single precision the exponent field is of 8 bits and has a bias value of 127. For double precision, the exponent field is of 11 bits, and has a bias of 1023.
  3. The mantissa : The mantissa, also known as the significand, represents the precision bits of the number. It is composed of an implicit leading bit and the fraction bits. The general structure of floating point number is,

Where S is significant (mantissa) digits, E is exponent, B is scaling factor, which is 2 for binary number, 10 for decimal number.

Leave a Comment