Floating point operations

Floating point operations

On machines which support the IEEE Standard for Binary Floating Point Arithmetic (ANSI/IEEE Standard 754-1985), the C compiler uses the IEEE standard single-precision, double-precision and extended-precision data types, operations, and conversions. Library functions are provided for further IEEE support.

You will probably not need any special functions to use floating point operations in your programs. If you do, however, you can find information about floating point support in this topic.

NOTE: For more information on how the C compilation system supports the IEEE standard see ``IEEE requirements''.

This topic discusses the following:

the details of IEEE arithmetic
floating point exception handling
conversion between binary and decimal values
single-precision floating point operations
implicit precision of subexpressions
IEEE requirements