PERCIVAL
David Mallasén, Raúl Murillo, Alberto Antonio Del Barrio, Guillermo Botella, Luís Piñuel, Manuel Prieto · 2023
Representing and operating on real numbers in a microprocessor presents unique challenges not encountered with the set of integers. Working with real numbers introduces additional concepts such as precision, that is, the error made between the number with which we want to operate and the approximation that we can represent in a finite number of bits. Currently, the universally extended way of representing the set of real numbers is using floating-point numbers defined by the IEEE 754 standard. This format presents a series of difficulties, such as the different rounding schemes, reproducibility problems depending on the implementation, a multitude of ways to represent Not a Numbers (NaNs) or the existence of plus and minus zero.