Understanding Floating Point Numbers in Programming

Floating point numbers are a huge part of any programmer's life - It's the way in which programming languages represent decimal numbers. We usually use them without second thought, but as it turns out, it's a fairly complex way to store a number! In this episode, we take a close look at how it works, as well as what concepts are relevant to it.



ERRATA: Please check the pinned comments for errors in this video and more information.



 There's more to floating point! In this video, we missed out on Denormal numbers, which is a special case for small numbers. For more, watch the video here → https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2FgF2sUoS8

Try it out and see how it works → https://resources.nerdfirst.net/float

= CONTENTS =
0:00 Introduction
0:48 Recap on the basic bits of an integer
1:06 Fixed point numbers
1:39 Problems of Fixed point numbers
4:37 Fundamentals of Floating point numbers
6:12 Worked example of Bits → Float
→ 6:34 Sign
→ 6:44 Exponent
→ 7:55 Mantissa
→ 8:52 Putting everything together
9:49 Worked example of Float → Bits
→ 10:12 Creating a Fixed point representation
→ 13:29 Deriving the exponent & mantissa
→ 15:12 Putting everything together

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