IEEE 754 standard

Summary

IEEE 754 is the technical standard for floating-point arithmetic used by almost all modern processors. It fixes the binary formats, such as single precision and double precision, and how their bits encode sign, exponent and significand. It requires the basic operations to be correctly rounded, and it defines special values: signed zeros, infinities, NaN and subnormal numbers. Because of it, the same floating-point program gives the same results on different machines, which makes error analysis portable.