HP-UX Floating-Point Guide

226 Glossary
Glossary
address. See also data cache
aliasing, instruction cache
aliasing.
ceiling The ceiling of a value is
the smallest whole number greater
than that value. See also floor.
comparison One of the basic
operations defined by the IEEE
standard. The comparison
operation determines the truth of
an assertion about the relationship
of two floating-point values.
There are four possible relations:
less than, equal, greater than, and
unordered. See also aware, non-
aware.
constant folding A compile-
time expression evaluation that
determines whether an expression
evaluates to a constant and, if it
does, replaces the expression with
the constant.
control register See floating-
point status register.
conversion One of the basic
operations defined by the IEEE
standard.
data cache aliasing The form of
cache aliasing that occurs when
the addresses of two data objects
have the same low-order bits but
different high-order bits. See also
cache aliases, instruction
cache aliasing.
denormalized value A floating-
point value that is represented by
a sign bit, a zero exponent, and a
non-zero fraction. (If the fraction
were also zero, the floating-point
value would be zero.) A
denormalized value has a
magnitude greater than zero and
less than any normalized value.
division One of the basic
operations defined by the IEEE
standard.
division by zero condition The
exception condition that occurs
when the system attempts to
divide a nonzero, finite value by
zero; more generally, when an
exact infinity is produced from
finite operands.
domain errors Errors generated
by math library routines when
they encounter invalid arguments.
See also range errors.
double-extended precision See
quad-precision.
double-precision An IEEE
floating-point format in which a
value occupies 64 bits: 1 bit for the