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:::The tan function (tangent) is included in the IEEE 754 and ISO C standards, for instance. The sentence "The asinPi, acosPi and tanPi functions..." is '''not''' about the tan function; moreover, this is historical information, as these functions are part of the current IEEE 754 standard as explained. My addition "assuming an accurate implementation of tan" is needed because some trig implementations are known to be inaccurate (at least for very large arguments), so who knows what one can get with such implementations... — [[User:Vincent Lefèvre|Vincent Lefèvre]] ([[User talk:Vincent Lefèvre|talk]]) 12:16, 13 March 2021 (UTC)
== Lead section edits ==
I [https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Floating-point_arithmetic&diff=1115713350&oldid=1114076215 edited the lead section] to try to tidy it up in the following ways:
- Previously the opening sentence was "In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic using formulaic representation of real numbers as an approximation to support a trade-off between range and precision." I found this opaque (what is "arithmetic using formulaic representation"?) and oblique (it doesn't tell you what a floating-point number is, it only talks about an attempted "trade-off"). I think Wikipedia articles should open by defining the thing at hand directly, rather than talking around it. Therefore, the new opening sentence explicitly describes floating-point representation: "In computing, floating-point arithmetic (FP) is arithmetic that represents real numbers approximately, using an integer with a fixed precisison, called the mantissa, scaled by an integer exponent of a fixed base."
- Both "significand" and "mantissa" are used to describe the non-exponent part of a floating-point number, but "mantissa" is far more common, so I think it's the better choice. (Google: "floating-point mantissa" yields 672,000 results; "floating-point significand" yields 136,000 results).
- Previously, the topic of the large dynamic range of floating-point numbers was mentioned twice separately; these mentions have been merged into a single paragraph.
- The links for examples of magnitude are changed to point to the actual examples mentioned (galactic distances and atomic distances).
Feel free to discuss here.
— [[User:Ka-Ping Yee|Ka-Ping Yee]] ([[User talk:Ka-Ping Yee|talk]]) 23:31, 12 October 2022 (UTC)
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