Assembler University 202: Floating-Point Assembly: Don't Let Your Precision Float Away!

Project and Program: Application Architecture Development and Integration, LE and Programming Languages

Tags: Proceedings , SHARE in Anaheim 2011 , 2011

One of the powerful concepts of Assembler Language is to adapt to changing data types and its ability to process all types of numerical data. For the numbers that are too large or too small to be effectively represented by integers, the mainframe utilizes Floating-Point arithmetic. Its advantage is the fact that a large range of values can be calculated without losing precision. The instructions of Floating-Point arithmetic can be used to perform calculations on operands having a wide range of magnitudes. These instructions obtain results scaled to preserve precision. As this data type is becoming popular it is important to learn and utilize this concept. (Since some time, IBM is providing SMF data in FP representation.)

 

 

At the end of this presentation participants will have a good understanding of the basic Floating-Point concepts including different types of Floating-Point numbers, as well as the FP support instructions and the hexadecimal FP instructions. Participants will be able to use Assembler Language to work on SMF and other commercial and scientific data.

Presenter(s): Mohammed I. Saifullah, EMC Corporation

 

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