floating-point: Designating or of a system of arithmetic, used especially in computer science, having its numbers expressed consisting of a mantissa, M, an exponent, E, and an assumed radix (base). The number represented is M * R^E where R is the radix. The radix is usually 10 or 2.
Many different representations are used for the mantissa and exponent themselves. The IEEE specify a standard representation which is used by many hardware floating-point systems.
Example: 0.0003 can be expressed as 3 × 10
-4
See also:
floating-point accelerator,
floating-point unit,
normalization
Compare:
fixed-point