| underflow (or "floating point underflow", "floating underflow", after "") A condition that can occur when the result of a operation would be smaller in magnitude (closer to zero, either positive or negative) than the smallest quantity representable. Underflow is actually (negative) of the of the quantity. For example, an eight-bit exponent can represent multipliers of 10^-128 to 10^127. A result less than 10^-128 would cause underflow. Depending on the , the programming language and the , underflow may set a status bit, raise an or generate a or some combination of these effects. Alternatively, it may just be ignored and zero substituted for the unrepresentable value, though this might lead to a later error which cannot be so easily ignored. (1997-08-25) |
на заглавную 
к началу страницы