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
Compare it to fixed point to understand it.
Say you have 5 digits, point fixed at 3 digits.
You could have numbers like 19.323, 27.999, 55.001 … and so on. Numbers between 100 and 0.001
With floating point, you can have:
98765. or 9874.9 or 0.00001
Now you can make numbers in a much larger range ! You just have to additional store where the point is at.
Latest Answers