Approximate representation of numbers as a fixed number of digits multiplied by a logarithmic scale.
Floating point is a representation of approximations of real numbers as a fixed number of digits multiplied by a logarithmic scale.
Basic reading
- David Goldberg. What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic. Computing Surveys, ACM, 1991. [HTML] [PDF]
- What Every Programmer Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic, or, Why don’t my numbers add up?
