 | Java Number Cruncher: The Java Programmer's Guide to Numerical Computing
By Ronald Mak
| | Table of Contents | | | | Chapter 3. The Floating-Point Standard |
References Arnold, Ken, James Gosling, and David Holmes, The Java Programming Language , 3rd edition, New York: Addison-Wesley, 2000.
This text discusses floating-point arithmetic in Section 6.6.2, as well as the strict and nonstrict modes in Section 6.6.3. Gosling, James, Bill Joy, Guy Steele, and Gilad Bracha, The Java Language Specification , 2nd edition, New York: Addison-Wesley, 2000.
This book specifies how Java does floating-point arithmetic in Sections 4.2.3 and 4.2.4. Section 15.4 contains the specification of FP-strict expressions. Sections 15.17 and 15.18.2 specifies the multiplicative and additive operators, respectively. Kahan, W., and Joseph D. Darcy, "How Java's Floating-Point Hurts Everyone Everywhere," Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of California, Berkeley. Originally presented March 1, 1998, at the ACM 1998 Workshop on Java for High-Performance Network Computing.
William Kahan, a computer science professor at the University of California at Berkeley, was one of the leaders of the development of the IEEE 754 standard. In this text, he and his coauthor criticize Java's deviations from the standard. Knuth, Donald E., The Art of Computer Programming, Volume 2: Seminumerical Algorithms , 3rd edition, Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1998.
This text contains a good introduction to floating-point arithmetic and error analysis, especially of the associative and commutative laws of addition, in Section 4.2. Overton, Michael L., Numerical Computing with IEEE Floating Point Arithmetic , Philadelphia: Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, 2001.
This book is an excellent overview of floating-point, in general, in Chapters 1 through 3 and of the IEEE 754 standard, in particular, in Chapters 4 through 7. Another good description of the standard is Goldberg, David, "What Every Computer Scientist Should Know about Floating-Point Arithmetic," in ACM Computing Surveys , Volume 12, Number 1, March 1991. Of course, the standard itself is short but worthwhile reading.  |
