how many bits are used are used to represent the exponent in a 32 bit floating point number?

Question

how many bits are used are used to represent the exponent in a 32 bit floating point number?

Answer 1

5

it is 2^5 = 32

Answer 2

This questions depends upon both the time that you are talking about and the floating point standards. Most computers today which have a 32 bit word size for 1 byte use the IEEE-754 standard.



See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Floating_point#History for some information and history on this.



See http://steve.hollasch.net/cgindex/coding/ieeefloat.html for the IEEE754 standard



Using that standard, the exponent uses 8 bits (as indicated in the chart) for a single precision floating number.

Answer 3

It depends on what floating point notation you are using. IEEE is the most common, but there are others. Besides, this sounds like homework and you should do your own homework.