What Is the IEEE Standard?

The IEEE standard was approved in 1985. Its main purpose is to define specifications for representing and manipulating floating-point values so that programs written on one IEEE-conforming machine can be moved to another conforming machine with predictable results. In addition, the standard is specifically designed to make it easier for programmers to write useful and robust floating-point programs. The standard defines the following:

Formats for representing floating-point numbers
Representations of special values (for example, infinity, very small values, and non-numbers)
Five types of exception conditions, when they occur, and what happens when they do occur
Four rounding modes (different algorithms for rounding values)
A minimum set of operations that can be performed on floating-point values, precisely defined so that they yield the same results for the same operands on any standard-conforming system

All HP 9000 systems comply with the IEEE standard. A complete understanding of the IEEE standard and your system's implementation of the standard is helpful for writing robust floating-point programs.

What Is the IEEE Standard?

Technical documentation

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