System for representing Floating Point values; kind of scientific notation with extra steps
What it looks like
For a 32 bit floating point.
| 32 | 31 - 23 | 22 - 0 |
|---|---|---|
| 0 | 00000000 | 0000000000000000000000 |
| Sign | Exponent | Mantissa |
Special Cases
| E == 0 | 0 < E < 255 | E == 255 | |
|---|---|---|---|
| M == 0 | 0 | Powers of 2 | |
| M != 0 | non-normalized, typically overflow | Ordinary numbers | Not a number (NaN) |