16.4 Floating-Point Arithmetic: Caveat Emptor!

Math class is tough!

Teen Talk Barbie, July 1992

This section provides a high-level overview of the issues involved when doing lots of floating-point arithmetic.101 The discussion applies to both hardware and arbitrary-precision floating-point arithmetic.

CAUTION: The material here is purposely general. If you need to do serious computer arithmetic, you should do some research first, and not rely just on what we tell you.


Footnotes

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There is a very nice paper on floating-point arithmetic by David Goldberg, “What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic,” ACM Computing Surveys 23, 1 (1991-03): 5-48. This is worth reading if you are interested in the details, but it does require a background in computer science.