4.2 Nomenclature and Types

A floating-point number or float for short, is an arbitrary precision significand (also called mantissa) with a limited precision exponent. The C data type for such objects is mpfr_t (internally defined as a one-element array of a structure, and mpfr_ptr is the C data type representing a pointer to this structure). A floating-point number can have three special values: Not-a-Number (NaN) or plus or minus Infinity. NaN represents an uninitialized object, the result of an invalid operation (like 0 divided by 0), or a value that cannot be determined (like +Infinity minus +Infinity). Moreover, like in the IEEE 754-1985 standard, zero is signed, i.e. there are both +0 and -0; the behavior is the same as in the IEEE 754-1985 standard and it is generalized to the other functions supported by MPFR.

The precision is the number of bits used to represent the significand of a floating-point number; the corresponding C data type is mp_prec_t. The precision can be any integer between MPFR_PREC_MIN and MPFR_PREC_MAX. In the current implementation, MPFR_PREC_MIN is equal to 2.

Warning! MPFR needs to increase the precision internally, in order to provide accurate results (and in particular, correct rounding). Do not attempt to set the precision to any value near MPFR_PREC_MAX, otherwise MPFR will abort due to an assertion failure. Moreover, you may reach some memory limit on your platform, in which case the program may abort, crash or have undefined behavior (depending on your C implementation).

The rounding mode specifies the way to round the result of a floating-point operation, in case the exact result can not be represented exactly in the destination significand; the corresponding C data type is mp_rnd_t.

A limb means the part of a multi-precision number that fits in a single word. (We chose this word because a limb of the human body is analogous to a digit, only larger, and containing several digits.) Normally a limb contains 32 or 64 bits. The C data type for a limb is mp_limb_t.