What Every Computer Scientist Should Know About Floating-Point Arithmetic Abstract Floating-point arithmetic is considered an esoteric subject by many people. This is rather surprising because floating-point is ubiquitous in computer systems. Almost every language has a floating-point datatype; computers from PCs to supercomputers have floating-point accelerators; most compilers will be called upon to compile floating-point algorithms from time to time; and virtually every operating system must respond to floating-point exceptions such as overflow. This paper presents a tutorial on those aspects of floating-point that have a direct impact on designers of computer systems. It begins with background on floating-point representation and rounding error, continues with a discussion of the IEEE floating-point standard, and concludes with numerous examples of how computer builders can better support floating-point. HTML: http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html PDF: http://www.wldelft.nl/soft/d3d/intro/misc/goldberg.pdf