Floating Point details

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.


I found a very good article describing various details about floating point like guarding digits, rounding error, various rules about addition etc.

The exact article is at the link :

http://docs.sun.com/source/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.html#689