Mata Matters: Overflow, underflow and the IEEE floating-point format
Abstract. Mata is Stata’s matrix language. The Mata Matters column shows how
Mata can be used interactively to solve problems and as a programming
language to add new features to Stata. In this quarter’s column, we
investigate underflow and overflow and then delve into the details of how
floating-point numbers are stored in the IEEE 754 floating-point standard.
We show how to test for overflow and underflow. We demonstrate how to use
the %21x format to see underflow and the %16H, %16L, %8H, and %8L formats
for displaying the byte content of doubles and floats.
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Jean Marie Linhart
View all articles with these keywords:
underflow, overflow, denormalized number, normalized number, subnormal number, double precision, missing values, IEEE 754, format, binary, hexadecimal
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