Lecture 2.
Floating Point
Numbers
Today I
introduced floating point numbers, through several different examples. We began
by comparing floating point numbers to a Real number line. We then saw an
example with a two decimal digit mantissa and two decimal digit exponent. We
then discussed the values realmin, realmax, and eps as they relate to this
extremely simple example. The floating point number system notation F( B, t ,
L, U) was used as a means to relate the values realmin, realmax, and eps to the
size of the exponent and mantissa. We looked at a tiny base two number system
and compared it to the first example that was base 10. On Friday we will look at
how floating point numbers affect arithmetic.
Posted: Wed - September 13, 2006 at 01:45 PM