Computer ScienceCode 9618
Floating-point numbers, representation and manipulation
What this topic asks you to be able to do
- Describe how binary floating-point real numbers are formatted
- Use two’s complement form
- Understand what happens to a floating-point representation when the split of bits between mantissa and exponent is changed
- Convert binary floating-point real numbers to denary and the reverse
- Normalise floating-point numbers
- Show an understanding of the effects of binary forms giving only an approximate value for the real number they stand for (in some cases)
- Understand the ways in which underflow and overflow may arise
- Show an understanding that rounding errors can result from binary representations