FLOAT is designed to educate on the intricacies of floating-point arithmetic and shine light on the important challenge of representing numbers in computers both in hardware and in software.
FLOAT is developed in bare Javascript, utilizing only the Decimal.js library to manage numbers with arbitrary precision. All the source code and resources are published within the GitHub repository.
FLOAT's main interface is the scientific notation display. Each aspect of the floating point representation is color coded: green for sign, blue for exponent, and red for mantissa. Click on any of these fields to change the value. The decimal number and other formattings will update in real-time as you manipulate these values.
Above the scientific notation display is the floating-point dropdown. From here, you can select from a multitude of representations. Currently, only the standard IEEE 754 floating point representations are supported.
Underneath the scientific notation display are details pertaining to the current value. These change in real-time with the scientific notation. Hover over any of the details to get more information on what they are.
Currently, FLOAT allows you to manipulate the scientific notation dictating the floating-point representation used for decimal conversion. Although this is core functionality of FLOAT, there are other functionalities planned for the future:
- Manipulate any representation of the decimal number to update its value
- Apply simple unary and binary operations such as negation and addition
- Generate tables for certain floating point attributes