Jean-Michel Muller (coordinator), CNRS, Laboratoire LIP, AriC team

Floating-point arithmetic is the most widely used way of implementing real-number arithmetic on modern computers. However, making such an arithmetic reliable and portable, yet fast, is a very difficult task. As a result, floating-point arithmetic is far from being exploited to its full potential. This handbook aims to provide a complete overview of modern floating-point arithmetic. So that the techniques presented can be put directly into practice in actual coding or design, they are illustrated, whenever possible, by a corresponding program.

The handbook is designed for programmers of numerical applications, compiler designers, programmers of floating-point algorithms, designers of arithmetic operators, and more generally, students and researchers in numerical analysis who wish to better understand a tool used in their daily work and research.

Part I: Introduction, Basic Definitions, and Standards.- Introduction.- Definitions and Basic Notations.- Floating-Point Formats and Environment.- Part II: Cleverly Using Floating-Point Arithmetic.- Basic Properties and Algorithms.- Enhanced FP Sums, Dot Products, and Polynomial Values.- Languages and Compilers.- Part III: Implementing Floating-Point Operators.- Algorithms for the Basic Operations.- Hardware Implementation of Floating-Point Arithmetic.- Software Implementation of Floating-Point Arithmetic.- Evaluating Floating-Point Elementary Functions.- Part IV: Extensions.- Complex Numbers.- Interval Arithmetic.- Verifying Floating-Point Arithmetic.- Extending the Precision.- Appendix A: Number Theory Tools.- Appendix B: Previous Standards.- References.- Index.