Floating-Point Formats and Environment

Jean-Michel Muller, Nicolas Brunie, Florent de Dinechin, Claude-Pierre Jeannerod, Mioara Joldes, Vincent Lefèvre, Guillaume Melquiond, Nathalie Revol and Serge Torres
Additional contact information
Jean-Michel Muller: CNRS - LIP
Nicolas Brunie: Kalray
Florent de Dinechin: INSA-Lyon - CITI
Claude-Pierre Jeannerod: Inria - LIP
Mioara Joldes: CNRS - LAAS
Vincent Lefèvre: Inria - LIP
Guillaume Melquiond: Inria - LRI
Nathalie Revol: Inria - LIP
Serge Torres: ENS-Lyon - LIP

Chapter Chapter 3 in Handbook of Floating-Point Arithmetic, 2018, pp 47-93 from Springer

Abstract: Abstract Our main focus in this chapter is the IEEE 754-2008 Standard for Floating-Point Arithmetic [267] IEEE 754-2008 standard , a revision and merge of the earlier IEEE 754-1985 [12] IEEE 754-1985 standard and IEEE 854-1987 [13] standards. A paper written in 1981 by Kahan, Why Do We Need a Floating-Point Standard? [315], depicts the rather messy situation of floating-point arithmetic before the 1980s. Anybody who takes the view that the current standard is too constraining and that circuit and system manufacturers could build much more efficient machines without it should read that paper and think about it. Even if there were at that time a few reasonably good environments, the various systems available then were so different that writing portable yet reasonably efficient numerical software was extremely difficult. For instance, as pointed out in [553], sometimes a programmer had to insert multiplications by 1. 0 to make a program work reliably.

Date: 2018
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DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-76526-6_3

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