Numerics question: reading floating point constants

Wolfgang Helbig helbig at Lehre.BA-Stuttgart.DE
Sun Apr 9 16:58:20 UTC 2006


>Do you know a good book or lectures on the problems related to number  
>representation in our nice
>computers?
>
>Stef

The book "Apple Numerics Manual, Addison-Wesley, 1986" describes SANE, "The 
Standard Apple Numerics Environment". This Manual book is a comprehensive 
description of an IEEE 754 implementation.

If you are programming more than "occasionally", as they say, then Volume 2, 
"Seminumerical Algorithms" of Knuth's "The Art of Computer
Programming" is for you. This tells you everything about floating point
numbers, their representation and software implementations for their
basic operations. It does not treat however the implementation of
transcendatal functions like sin or exp. So if any of you knows where to find
information about that, I'd like to hear from you.

Both of those books a fairly seasoned, but the material they cover didn't
change much over the time, at least to my knowlegde, which didn't change
either much over time :-).

Greetings,
Wolfgang
--
Weniger, aber besser.




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