[Oberon] FP

[Chris Burrows]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: Paul Onyschuk [mailto:ptmelville at gmail.com]
> Sent: Tuesday, 15 April 2014 11:20 PM
> To: ETH Oberon and related systems
> Subject: Re: [Oberon] FP
> 
> To not make complete offtopic out of this, I'll provide one more scrap of
> information.  Floating point numbers are tricky, to the point where even
IBM
> got it wrong at one point [1] - serious issues with precision related to
> their model.  Guess this is best explanation why floating point numbers
from
> RISC Oberon were modeled after IEEE.
> 
> [1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Floating_Point_Architecture
> 

If you want to delve even deeper read "What Every Computer Scientist Should
Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic" by David Goldberg:

http://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html

He explains some of the reasons why the IEEE format was designed the way it
was in the sections following the heading "The IEEE Standard",

Regards,
Chris