retroforth/book/Programming-Techniques-Working-With-Floating-Point

# Working With Floating Point

Some RETRO systems include support for floating point numbers.
When present, this is built over the system `libm` using the
C `double` type.

Floating point values are typically 64 bit IEEE 754 double
precision (1 bit for the sign, 11 bits for the exponent, and
the remaining 52 bits for the value), i.e. 15 decimal digits
of precision.

## Prefix

Floating point numbers start with a `.`

Examples:

   Token    Value
    .1       1.0
    .0.5     0.5
    .-.4    -0.4
    .1.3     1.3

## Namespace

Floating point words are in the `f:` namespace. There is also
a related `e:` namespace for *encoded values*, which allows
storing of floats in standard memory.

## Operation

Floating point values exist on a separate stack, and are bigger
than the standard memory cells, so can not be directly stored
and fetched from memory.

The floating point system also provides an alternate stack that
can be used to temporarily store values.

f:nip
f:over
f:pop
f:adepth
f:push
f:dump-astack
f:dump-stack
f:depth
f:drop
f:drop-pair
f:dup
f:dup-pair
f:tuck
f:swap


f:*
f:+
f:-
f:-INF
f:-eq?
f:-inf?
f:/
f:E
f:E1
f:INF
f:NAN
f:PI
f:abs
f:acos
f:asin
f:atan
f:between?
f:case
f:ceiling
f:cos
f:dec
f:eq?
f:fetch
f:floor
f:gt?
f:inc
f:inf?
f:limit
f:log
f:lt?
f:max
f:min
f:nan?
f:negate
f:negative?
f:positive?
f:power
f:put
f:rot
f:round
f:sign
f:signed-sqrt
f:signed-square
f:sin
f:sqrt
f:square
f:store
f:tan
f:to-e
f:to-number
f:to-string
f:tuck

## Encoded Values

RETRO provides a means of encoding and decoding floating point
values into standard integer cells. This is based on the paper
"Encoding floating point values to shorter integers" by Kiyoshi
Yoneda and Charles Childers.