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(Mantissa, Exponent) Operations

In order to define operations on the whole real line, a (mantissa,exponent) representation is used. The mantissa is either a dyadic or signed binary stream, and the exponent is an integer of unrestricted size. Addition, subtraction, and multiplication can all be implemented using a stream operation and modifying the exponent separately. The full division algorithm presented in this section is more complicated.



 

Martin Escardo
5/11/2000