Hello everyone. I am planning to write a program, part of which will be able to calculate the value of an irrational number to an unlimited number of places. I will probably use a C++ class to implement a custom array to store these numbers. However, I need to know a couple of things about floating point values first:

1. If you have declared a standard "float" type variable in C and initialised it with a value, how do you know how many bits have been used for the exponent and how many for the modulus?

2. If you store 0.8743 (for example) in a float, are the four decimal digits after the point stored in the modulus in decimal form i.e.:

1000 0111 0100 0011

--8-----7-----4-----3---


Or is some other system used? Any answers would be appriciated.

Steven.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IEEE_754 for information on how float and double are typically implemented.