7 - Compilation of FP Programs

Abstract

The IEEE-754 standard has improved the portability and reproducibility of the results of FP programs by mandating that every basic FP operation be performed as if the result was first computed with infinite precision and then rounded to the target format. In particular, most hardware components providing FP arithmetic are nowadays compliant with this standard. Unfortunately, this still does not guarantee that an FP program will behave in a reproducible way, as both the programming language and the compiler can interfere with the proper execution of FP arithmetic.