Technical Considerations
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Technical Considerations
Exception Handling
The IEEE standard defines five exceptions that indicate when an exceptional event has occurred. They are
■invalid operation
■underflow
■overflow
■division by zero
■inexact result
There are three ways an application can deal with exceptions:
■Continue operation.
■Stop on exceptions if the programmer thinks they will invalidate results.
■Include code to do something special when exceptions happen.
The IEEE standard lets programs deal with the exceptions in reasonable ways. It defines the special values NaN
About the FPCE Technical Report
Even though many computers now conform to the IEEE standard, the standard has suffered from a lack of
For instance, the standard defines data formats that should be supported but does not tell how these data formats should map to variable types in
However, the definition of a binding is in progress for the C programming language. The
The FPCE technical report not only specifies how to implement the requirements of the IEEE standards, but also requires some additional functions, called transcendental functions (sometimes called elementary functions). These functions are consistent with the IEEE standard and can be used as building
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