Questions tagged [floating-point]
Floating point arithmetic: number formats, instruction sets, software and hardware implementations.
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Why does Sinclair BASIC have two formats for storing numbers in the same structure?
The ZX Spectrum has two formats for storing numbers, both 40 bits, or five bytes.
The first is a floating point format, which consists of one exponent byte, and four mantissa bytes. The first bit of ...
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How did the 8086 interface with the 8087 FPU coprocessor?
The 8087 has many instructions - too many, it seems, to be encoded as part of the 8086 instruction set. How did the Intel 8086 interface with an Intel 8087 FPU that a user added?
Consider the ...
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Why did 8-bit Basic use 40-bit floating point?
Nowadays floating point is usually either 32 or 64 bits, sometimes 16, occasionally 128. But of course, the Basic interpreters on the 8-bit machines, having to implement floating point in software ...
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How is FSTSW AX implemented on the 80286/80287?
The x87 instruction set does not support direct transfers between general purpose registers and floating point registers. This is mainly a consequence of the 8087/80287/80387 being a separate chip ...
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Did any compiler fully use Intel x87 80-bit floating point?
There is a paradox about floating point that I'm trying to understand.
Floating point is an eternal struggle with the problem that real numbers happen to be both essential and incomputable. It's the ...
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Why not use fractions instead of floating point?
Considering all those early home computers, the ZX Spectrum, the Galaksija, the VIC-20, the Apple I/II/III, and all of those, they all have some 8-bit CPU which does integer arithmetic and no floating ...
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What aspect of portable floating point did Java back down on?
Java was released under the slogan 'write once, run anywhere'; while its adoption was probably more about 'now we have a language that provides garbage collection in a familiar workflow and with a ...
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Did any PC software floating point use non-IEEE format?
During the 1980s, prior to the 486 (well, strictly speaking, prior to the discontinuing of the 486SX in the nineties), IBM PCs and compatibles had hardware floating point only in the form of an ...
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Commodore BASIC and binary floating point precision
I am mildly curious that though the 6502 provides BCD arithmetic which would be useful for implementing decimal floating point, Commodore BASIC uses, like all (?) Micro-Soft BASIC, binary floating ...
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How did dusty deck Fortran handle overflow?
In Fortran 77, numerical code that ran on IBM, CDC, Cray etc, how was overflow typically handled?
Did it raise an exception? (I would expect such an exception to be inexact on vector machines, i.e. to ...
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Clear description of MS BASIC number → string conversions?
I'm failing to find a concise document that describes the formatting used by (6502) MS BASIC when converting internal floating-point numbers to text for display in PRINT, STR$, etc.
I know it has a ...
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What were the most common applications of the 8087?
The original IBM PC had a slot for the 8087 floating-point coprocessor. This was a somewhat esoteric feature at the time – previous microcomputers had done all their floating-point in software – but ...
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