Generally, it is important to estimate and control round-off errors arising from the use of floating point arithmetic.
It soon became apparent that fixed point arithmetic was a bad idea because the numbers quickly went out of range.
This shows why floating point arithmetic is unsuitable for accounting software.
An example of this might be binary floating point arithmetic, which is a common requirement in many systems.
Floating point arithmetic is supported through external libraries that are very efficient.
As microprocessors developed, the cost of integrating the floating point arithmetic functions into the processor declined.
The Intel 8087 math coprocessor was the first x86 device which supported floating point arithmetic in hardware.
Both input and output were in decimal numbers, and it used floating point arithmetic.
Normal computers use 32- or 64-bit floating point arithmetic to calculate probabilities.
There are only 64 machine codes, including a no operation code, with no fixed point arithmetic in the central processor.