The Floating-Point Environment

This section describes the Visual Fortran numeric environment using IEEE arithmetic. The following topics are covered:

• Representing Numbers
• Loss of Precision Errors: Rounding, Special Values, Underflow, and Overflow
• Setting and Retrieving Floating-Point Status and Control Words (ia32 systems only)
• Handling Arithmetic Exceptions
• Intel Pentium Floating-Point Flaw (ia32 systems only)

When the term floating-point unit (FPU) appears, it refers to your math processor. The descriptions in this section minimize hardware-specific terminology.