In the IEEE 754-2008 standard (referred to as IEEE 754 henceforth), a floating-point representation is an unencoded member of a floating-point format which represents either a finite number, a signed infinity, or some kind of NaN. An element of the subset of floating-point representations consisting of finite numbers and signed infinities is called a floating-point number. A floating-point representation of a finite real number has three components: A sign, an exponent, and a significand. The numerical value of a representation of a finite floating-point number is the signed product of its significand and its radix b element {2, 10} raised to the power of its exponent; in particular, note that the floating-point representation of a given value may not be unique, particularly when the radix is 10 (IEEE Computer Society 2008).

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