HP-UX Floating-Point Guide

Glossary 225
Glossary
Items in this font represent terms
that are defined elsewhere in the
glossary.
addition One of the basic
operations defined by the IEEE
standard.
alignment The type of address
that a data object has in memory.
Data objects can have 1-byte, 2-
byte, 4-byte, or 8-byte alignment,
meaning that the object is stored
at an address evenly divisible by 1,
2, 4, or 8.
archive library A collection of
object modules. When an
application is linked with an
archive library, the linker scans
the contents of the archive library
and extracts the object modules
that satisfy any unresolved
references in the application. The
linker copies the archive library
modules into the application’s
code section. See also shared
library.
aware A version of a
comparison assertion that treats
a NaN (Not-a-Number) as a
special value that compares as
neither less than nor greater than
any normalized value, and as
unequal to any value, including
another NaN and itself. See also
non-aware.
bias In a floating-point
representation, a value that is
subtracted from the represented
exponent to get the actual
exponent. For single-precision
formats, the bias is 127; for
double-precision formats, it is
1023; for quad-precision formats,
it is 16383. See also biased
representation.
biased representation A
floating-point representation
that adds a constant value (the
bias) to the actual exponent, so
that actual exponents, which may
be negative or positive, are always
represented as positive.
BLAS library The Basic Linear
Algebra Subroutine (BLAS)
library, a math library that
contains routines that perform
low-level vector and matrix
(array) operations. This library is
provided with the HP Fortran 90
and FORTRAN/9000 products
only.
cache aliases Two sets of data
or instruction addresses that have
the same n low-order bits and
therefore occupy the same cache