What is a Floating Point Number?
A basic data type, but what is it?
4 min readApr 13, 2020
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!
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:
