ABSTRACT
This chapter introduces the students to modes of storage of users’ numbers in a computer memory and provides basic concepts of computer arithmetic, referred to also as Floating Point Arithmetic. It applies the arithmetic principles only to Single and Double Precision Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) systems. The chapter discusses the methods of conversion from one base to another in a binary system. It introduces the octal and hexadecimal systems as they are often needed as intermediate stages between the binary and decimal systems. A computer operating in binary normalized floating point mode represents numbers except for the limitation imposed by the finite word length. The chapter describes the internal representation and storage of numbers for IEEE floating point systems and also analyzes some properties of these systems.
