IEEE 754 Revision

IEEE 754 Revision

IEEE 754-2008 (previously known as IEEE 754r) was published in August 2008 and is a significant revision to, and replaces, the IEEE 754-1985 floating point standard. The revision extended the previous standard where it was necessary, added decimal arithmetic and formats, tightened up certain areas of the original standard which were left undefined, and merged in IEEE 854 (the radix-independent floating-point standard).

In a few cases, where stricter definitions of binary floating-point arithmetic might be performance-incompatible with some existing implementation, they were made optional.