Flonums

Previous Number Constants

A flonum represents a floating point number. The translation is indirect: a decimal floating point number from the text is converted by as to a generic binary floating point number of more than sufficient precision. This generic floating point number is converted to a particular computer's floating point format (or formats) by a portion of as specialized to that computer. The version of as used by TIGCC does not use TI's SMAP II BCD format; it emits standard IEEE floating point numbers. It would be pointless to implement the correct behavior, since the appropriate numbers are easy to write, and converting between base 2 and 10 can decrease precision.

A flonum is written by writing (in order)

At least one of the integer part or the fractional part must be present. The floating point number has the usual base-10 value.

as does all processing using integers. Flonums are computed independently of any floating point hardware in the computer running as.