SOEN 228 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Scientific Notation, Double-Precision Floating-Point Format, Numerical Analysis
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These review notes are not intended to replace your own note taking. Writing your own notes in your own words is a valuable learning tool and is also often required at the workplace (where it is called documentation). In addition, writing notes often helps both the learning process and the duration that material stays in memory. Think of note taking as early exam preparation. In the fifth week we introduced the format used to represent numbers in sign-magnitude and two"s complement. This corresponded to using a bit (the left most or most significant bit) to indicate whether the number was positive (sign bit 0) or negative (sign bit 1). The magnitude is represented by the remaining bits. For example given 8-bits to represent a sign-magnitude format the sign bit (cid:862)s(cid:863) is the leftmost and the remaining 7 bits are used to represent the magnitude (cid:862)m(cid:863) in powers of two.