on floating-point numbers

[Hope Rouselle]

Julio Di Egidio <julio at diegidio.name> writes:

> On Thursday, 2 September 2021 at 15:52:02 UTC+2, Hope Rouselle wrote:
>
>> I don't understand floating-point numbers from the inside out, but I do 
>> know how to work with base 2 and scientific notation. So the idea of 
>> expressing a number as 
>> 
>> mantissa * base^{power} 
>
> That's the basic idea, but the actual (ISO) floating-point *encoding*
> is more complicated than that.
>
>> is not foreign to me. (If that helps you to perhaps instruct me on 
>> what's going on here.) 
>
> This is the "classic":
> DAVID GOLDBER
> What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic
> <http://perso.ens-lyon.fr/jean-michel.muller/goldberg.pdf>
>
> Here is some more introductory stuff:
> <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating-point_arithmetic>
> <https://www.phys.uconn.edu/~rozman/Courses/P2200_15F/downloads/floating-point-guide-2015-10-15.pdf>

Rozman's was pretty concise and nice.  Thank you.