ieee-754

Is there any way I can read bytes of a float value in JS? What I need is to write a raw FLOAT or DOUBLE value into some binary format I need to make, so is there any way to get a byte-by-byte IEEE 754 representation? And same question for writing of course. KooiInc Would this snippet help? @ Kevin Gadd : var parser = new BinaryParser ,forty = parser.encodeFloat(40.0,2,8) ,twenty = parser.encodeFloat(20.0,2,8); console.log(parser.decodeFloat(forty,2,8).toFixed(1)); //=> 40.0 console.log(parser.decodeFloat(twenty,2,8).toFixed(1)); //=> 20.0 You can do it with typed arrays : var buffer = new

I have seen long articles explaining how floating point numbers can be stored and how the arithmetic of those numbers is being done, but please briefly explain why when I write cout << 1.0 / 3.0 <<endl; I see 0.333333 , but when I write cout << 1.0 / 3.0 + 1.0 / 3.0 + 1.0 / 3.0 << endl; I see 1 . How does the computer do this? Please explain just this simple example. It is enough for me. The problem is that the floating point format represents fractions in base 2. The first fraction bit is ½, the second ¼, and it goes on as 1 / 2 n . And the problem with that is that not every rational number

I am reading a C book, talking about ranges of floating point, the author gave the table: Type Smallest Positive Value Largest value Precision ==== ======================= ============= ========= float 1.17549 x 10^-38 3.40282 x 10^38 6 digits double 2.22507 x 10^-308 1.79769 x 10^308 15 digits I dont know where the numbers in the columns Smallest Positive and Largest Value come from. These numbers come from the IEEE-754 standard, which defines the standard representation of floating point numbers. Wikipedia article at the link explains how to arrive at these ranges knowing the number of bits

I have just heard that the iphone cannot do double natively thereby making them much slower that regular float. Is this true? Evidence? I am very interested in the issue because my program needs high precision calculations, and I will have to compromise on speed. The iPhone can do both single and double precision arithmetic in hardware. On the 1176 (original iPhone and iPhone3G), they operate at approximately the same speed, though you can fit more single-precision data in the caches. On the Cortex-A8 (iPhone3GS, iPhone4 and iPad), single-precision arithmetic is done on the NEON unit instead