Design of Floating-Point Data Types

摘要

The author discusses the issues involved in designing the floating-point part of a programming language. Looking at the language specifications for most existing languages might suggest that this design involves only trivial issues such as whether to have one or two types of REALs or how to name the functions that convert from INTEGER to REAL. He shows that there are more significant semantic issues involved. After discussing the tradeoffs for the major design decisions, he illustrates them by presenting the design of the floating-point part of the Modula-3 language. (Copyright (c) 1993 Xerox Corporation. All rights reserved.)