IEEE Standard for Floating-Point, ASCII, and Hexadecimal

Across the past two blogs, which you can reference here and here, I have written about bits and binary. I have written of the system we use today and how it came into being; I have written of the different logical functions that can be performed on binary digits. Up to this point, though, we have only dealt with whole numbers: integers. Now, it is time to look into how we can represent decimals in binary.

Most commonly, computers use 16-bit registers; though, this is not a strict requirement and may vary. As such, computers can store…