Floating Point Numbers

With the proliferation of increasingly complex software and hardware that perform tasks as varied as financial calculations or scientific experiments, the arithmetic involved in these operations has also grown cumbersome. Simple arithmetic is no longer sufficient when trying to compute things such as telephone call rates that are billed by the second and require six or more fractional digits or the Gross National Product of countries that may require fifteen digits to the left of the decimal (Cowlishaw, 2003, p. 3). The computing of such a wide range of numbers requires the use of computers and floating point numbers.

When dealing with computers, real numbers and the infinite combinations that they require are simply too inefficient to handle. The floating point number is designed to eliminate this problem. Floating point numbers can be either single precision or double precision. Single precision numbers have about eight significant decimal...
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