CISC 121 Lecture Notes - Lecture 9: Approximation Error

• School: Queen's University
• Department: Computing
• Course: CISC 121
• Professor: Margaret Lamb

Document Summary

Languages like java and turing wants portability so everything must work the same on every computer. Speed is compromised beause what should be done by the hardware but its done by software. Other languages like python and c want speed so some programs that work on one computer wont work on others. Range of values goes from -2^31 to 2^31 - 1 float = approx. Absolute error: |exact value - computer value| relative error: |(exact value - computer value)/exact value| Overflow/underflow - computer representations have limits on size of exponents.