Decimal Arithmetic Specification,
version 1.08 Copyright (c) IBM Corporation, 2003. All rights reserved. © |
8 Jan 2003 |
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[1] | IEEE 854-1987 – IEEE Standard for Radix-Independent Floating-Point Arithmetic, The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers, Inc., New York, 1987. |
[2] | Sometimes called ‘fixed-point’ decimal arithmetic. |
[3] | Some proposed representations can be found in: http://www2.hursley.ibm.com/decimal/deccode.pdf |
[4] | This is because the conventional implementation of this operator would be unacceptably long-running for the range of numbers allowed by this specification (with up to nine digits of exponent). For restricted-range numbers, an implementation can easily be made to conform to IEEE 854 in this respect. |
[5] | This follows the current proposals of the IEEE 754R committee which is revising IEEE 754 and IEEE 854. Dependence on the trap-enabler setting is difficult to make thread-safe, and also the IEEE 854 definition does not generalize to the power operator (the required replacement value may itself overflow or underflow). An implementation may provide the IEEE values, if feasible, to a trap handler via some separate mechanism, but this is not required by this specification. |
[6] | This follows the current proposals of the IEEE 754R committee which is revising IEEE 754 and IEEE 854. |