Thanks to widespread hardware support, IEEE 754 floating-point computations are increasingly finding their way into embedded C code, and in particular into critical embedded C code.
Floating-point computations are notorious for the traps they lay on the programmer's path. The programmer who uses them should be aware that the result of a floating point operation is (depending on the rounding mode and on the operation itself) only one of the real numbers that can be represented as a floating-point number and that approximates more or less closely the actual result (as computed in the reals). In the worse cases, these approximations may accumulate and compound each other to the point that the final result obtained with floating-point computations is meaningless.
