What is a Floating Point Number?

A basic data type, but what is it?

A simple question. this is a number which can store a decimal point. But why don’t we use this for every type of number? Read on to find out!

Photo by Shazmyn Ali on Unsplash

Difficulty: Beginner | Easy | Normal | Challenging

Prerequisites:

• None, although negative numbers are stored as Two’s Complement which is not covered here (guide HERE)

Terminology

Data types: A representation of the tyoe of data that can be processed, for example Integer or String

Exponent: The section of a decimal place after the decimal place

Floating Point: A number without a fixed number of digits before and after the decimal point

Integer: A number that has no fractional part, that is no digits after the decimal point

Mantissa: The section of a Floating point number before the decimal place

Precision: How precise or accurate something is

Real numbers: Another name for Floating Point Numbers

Floating point numbers:

Why they are required: