floating point
Also known as floating point number, float
computer format for representing rational numbers
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Article
An early electromechanical programmable computer, the Z3, included floating-point arithmetic (replica on display at Deutsches Museum in Munich).
In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic on subsets of real numbers formed by a significand (a signed sequence of a fixed number of digits in some base) multiplied by an integer power of that base. Numbers of this form are called floating-point numbers.