Scale Factor (computer Science) - Uses

Uses

Certain number formats may be chosen for an application for convenience in programming, or because of certain advantages offered by the hardware for that number format. For instance, early processors did not natively support the IEEE floating point standard for representing fractional values, so integers were used to store representations of the real world values by applying a scale factor to the real value. By necessity, this was done in software, since the hardware did not support fractional value.