I tried to Google that but it didn’t help, so please be patient with me. I found this:
“The term floating point is derived from the fact that there is no fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point; that is, the decimal point can float. There are also representations in which the number of digits before and after the decimal point is set, called fixed-point representations. In general, floating-point representations are slower and less accurate than fixed-point representations, but they can handle a larger range of numbers.”
That doesn’t make sense to me. The decimal point stays where it is. What am I missing here?
In: 9
If I asked you the speed of light, are you more likely to say 300,000,000 m/s or 3.0 * 10^8 m/s? Probably the latter.
With floating point numbers, the numbers are actually represented in a scientific notation. This allows a floating point number to be quite large, representing incredibly large numbers, or very tiny, representing very small fractions of a number.
When we write something in scientific notation, we move the decimal point. This is the floating point that we talk about.
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