HP-UX Floating-Point Guide

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Preface
The HP-UX Floating-Point Guide describes how floating-point arithmetic
is implemented on HP 9000 systems and discusses how floating-point
behavior affects the programmer. This book provides information useful
to any programmer writing or porting floating-point-intensive programs.
We recommend that you start with Chapter 1, which not only provides
an overview of floating-point principles but also provides important
information about HP-UX math libraries.
If you are unfamiliar with floating-point issues, you should go next to
Chapter 2 and Chapter 3. Chapter 2 provides an overview of the IEEE
Standard for Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic, which constitutes the
foundation for many floating-point architectures, including Hewlett-
Packard’s. For more specific information about the standard, contact the
IEEE Standards Board. Chapter 3 describes the many factors that can
cause floating-point computations to produce unexpected results.
If you already understand floating-point issues, you may want to go
directly to Chapter 4 and the subsequent chapters and appendixes,
which provide specific information about floating-point behavior on HP
9000 systems and about the libraries and facilities available on these
systems.
If you have the HP FORTRAN/9000 (FORTRAN 77) compiler, all of the
sample programs in this manual are online, in the directory
/opt/fortran/lib/demos/FPGuide.
Comments We welcome your comments on this manual. Please send electronic mail
to [e-mail], or send regular mail to
MLL Learning Products
Hewlett-Packard Company
Mailstop: CHR 02 DC
300 Apollo Drive
Chelmsford, MA 01824
Audience This manual is written for application developers who write programs
that perform mathematical operations. It assumes a basic knowledge of
the HP-UX operating system and of a high-level programming language
such as C or Fortran.