IEEE 754 formats
English (en) │
single, double and extended are Pascal's data types implementing the platform-dependent real. All of them are implemented according IEEE standard 754, where single is “single-precision”, double is “double-precision”, and extended has 80 bits.
|value range||1.5E-45 .. 3.4E38|
|accuracy||6-9 significant decimal digits precision|
|memory requirement||4 bytes or 32 bits|
|property|| The single- data-type data field can hold floating-point values and signed and unsigned integer values.
Assigning other values will result in error messages from the compiler when the program is compiled, and the compile will be aborted. That is, the executable program is not created.
Definition of a data field of data type Single:
var s: Single;
Examples of assigning valid values:
s := -123.45678; s := 0; s := 123.45678;
Examples of assigning invalid values:
s := '-123.45678'; s := '0'; s := '123.45678';
The difference between the two examples is that the upper example is the assignment of Integer and FloatingCommand literals, while the assignment of the lower example is literals of the String type.
Binary floating-point format
Any value stored as a single requires 32 bits, formatted as shown in the table below:
|31||Sign (0 = positive, 1 = negative)|
|30 to 23||Exponent, biased by 127|
|22 to 0||Fraction f of the number 1.f|
Any value stored as a double requires 64 bits, formatted as shown in the table below:
|63||Sign (0 = positive, 1 = negative)|
|62 to 52||Exponent, biased by 1023|
|51 to 0||Fraction f of the number 1.f|
|simple data types|
|complex data types|