Decimal Conversion Ranges in the IEEE 754 Specification (Binary Floating-Point Arithmetic)

Question

Table 2 in section 5.6 on the bottom of page 11 of the IEEE 754 specification lists the ranges of decimal values for which decimal to binary floating-point conversion must be performed. The ranges of exponents don't make sense to me. For example, for double-precision, the table says the maximum decimal value eligible to be converted is (10¹⁷-1)*10⁹⁹⁹. That's way bigger then DBL_MAX, which is approximately 1.8*10³⁰⁸. Obviously I'm missing something -- can someone explain this table to me? Thanks.

Answer 1

[Side note: technically, the document you link to is no longer a standard; "IEEE 754" should really only be used to refer to the updated edition of the standard published in 2008.]

My understanding is that, as you say, the left-hand column of that table describes the range of valid inputs to any decimal string to binary float conversion that's provided. So for example, a decimal string that's something like '1.234e+879' represents the value 1234*10^876 (M = 1234, N = 876), so is within the table limits, and is required to be accepted by the conversion functionality. Though note that exactly what form the decimal strings are allowed to take is outside the scope of IEEE 754; it's only the value that's relevant here.

I don't think it's a problem that some of the allowed inputs can be outside the representable range of a double; the usual rules for overflow should be followed in this case; see section 7.3 of the document. That is, the overflow exception should be signaled, and assuming that it's not trapped the result of the conversion (for a positive out-of-range value, say) is positive infinity if the rounding mode is round to nearest or round towards positive infinity, and the largest finite representable value if the rounding mode is round towards negative infinity or round towards zero.

Slightly more subtly, from my reading of this document, a decimal string like '1e+1000' should also be accepted by the conversion function, since the value it represents is expressible in the form 10 * 10^999, or even 10000000000000000 * 10^984. See the sentence that starts 'On input, trailing zeros shall be appended to or stripped from M ...' in section 5.6.

The current version of IEEE 754 seems to be a bit different in this respect, judging by the publicly available draft version (version 1.2.5): it just requires each implementation to specify bounds [-η, η] on the exponent of the decimal string, with η large enough to accomodate the decimal strings corresponding to finite binary values in the largest supported binary format; so if the binary64 format is the largest supported format, it looks to me as though η = 400 would be plenty big enough, for example.