Why Floating-Point Numbers are not Always Accurate

In this post, I will explain why Floating-Point numbers are not always precise. First, let me remind us of the basics of Floating-Point representation quickly.

If you are a programmer and handling numbers with fractions (for example to represent an elapsed time[secs] since a certain event or transaction money[dollars]), you might have heard that you should not use Floating-Point types because they are not always accurate/precise.

In this post, I will explain why Floating-Point numbers are not always precise.

First, let me remind us of the basics of Floating-Point representation quickly.

Floating-Point representation

IEEE 754 floating point standard specifies binary representation format of floating point as below,

By Codekaizen — Own work, CC BY 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3651274

In this case, the floating-point value representation has 32 bits size(called single-precision, for the rest of the post, I will focus on the single-precision floating-point). In C or C++ programming language, this corresponds to _float _type on most platforms(C++ standard does not specify the size).

• sign: the sign of the floating-point number (1 bit).
• exponent: the value that is placed in the exponent field on base 2 (8 bits).
• fraction: the value generally between 0 and 1, placed in the fraction field(23 bits).

To compute a number from the encoded value, the following form is used.

IEEE 754 adds an invisible leading bit(that is not actually encoded) with value 1 to save more bits in the fraction bits.

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