Electrical
and Computer Engineering
3 of 12
UAH
CPE 112
More on Floating-Point Numbers
•Comparing Floating-Point Numbers: check for an error within some range
•Underflow and
Overflow: Numbers can be too large or too
small to be represented.
•Cancellation Error: problems can occur when arithmetic operations occur on values of wildly different magnitudes: (1 + 0.00001234 – 1) = 0.00001234. For four digits of precision, this doesn’t work, why?