IEEE 754 support and implications

From: Richard <richard.rankin_at_ieee.org>
Date: Sat, 20 Aug 2011 14:28:11 -0700 (PDT)
Message-ID: <69c0ebd5-a150-49c9-b0f0-529dd91fed58_at_c29g2000yqd.googlegroups.com>

As of 10g Oracle supports IEEE 754 with 32-bit (5 bytes) BINARY_FLOAT (BFLOAT) and 64-bit (9 bytes) BINARY_DOUBLE (BDOUBLE). These types are supported in C, Java, Ada, PL/SQL, etc.These are native machine binary types which need not be converted from

For these types the following values are supported:

+0

-0
Inf
+Inf

-Inf
NaN (Not a number)

Division by zero does not produce an exception in all cases. These datatypes are subject to rounding and accuracy errors.

Misuse of these datatypes has caused naval vessels (USS Yorktown, 1997) to become dead in the water and launch vehicles with payload to be scattered over vast areas (Ariadne, 1996).

I would like to know more about the purpose, use and misuse of these datatypes. Received on Sat Aug 20 2011 - 16:28:11 CDT