The algorithms developed ten years ago in preparation for IBM's support of IEEE Floating-Point on its mainframe S/390 processor use an overly conservative intermediate precision to guarantee correctly-rounded results across the entire exponent range. here we study the minimal requirement for both bounded and unbounded precision on the decimal side (converting to machine precision on the binary side). An interesting new theorem on Continued Fraction expansions is offered, as well as an open problem on the growth of partial quotients for ratios of powers of two and five.
By: Michel Hack
Published in: RC23203 in 2004
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