CSCI 1120 Lecture Notes - Lecture 37: Ieee Floating Point, Radix Point, Floating Point

• School: Dalhousie University
• Department: Computer Science
• Course: CSCI 1120
• Professor: Christian Blouin

Document Summary

Draw a line between binary system and binary encoding. There is a blurred line because we rely on the base 2 system for encoding, but we need to know that they are different. A numeric alphabet which ahs two characters, 1 and 0. To come up with a binary string, we need to acknowledge that every decimal number is the sum of a bunch of powers of 2. Best way to approach this is to write down our powers of 2. 01100111 is the binary encoding for the decimal value 103. The smallest value we can express in this system, without a way to express negative values, is 0. In 8 bit, the maximum value is 255. One byte is equal to 8 bit n bits allows us to encode 2n values. We need to acknowledge that negative values exist. Somehow we need to engineer how to handle the sign by using only binary characters.