Further Floating Facts
Floating point is well understood: IEEE 754 FP Standard
Single precision -- one word representation of fp
Double precision -- two word representation of fp
Range --
Single: 2.0 x 10-38 through 2.0 x 1038
Double: 2.0 x 10-308 through 2.0 x 10308
MSB of normalized mantissa not represented: 24, 53 bits
Zero is represented as 000...0, i.e. it has no implied MSB
FP has the property that when a<b as signed magnitude
numbers then a<b as floating point numbers