Mata Matters: Overflow, Underflow and the IEEE Floating-Point Format

Abstract

Mata is Stata's matrix language. The Mata Matters column shows how Mata can be used interactively to solve problems and as a programming language to add new features to Stata. In this quarter's column, we investigate underflow and overflow and then delve into the details of how floating-point numbers are stored in the IEEE 754 floating-point standard. We show how to test for overflow and underflow. We demonstrate how to use the %21x format to see underflow and the %16H, %16L, %8H, and %8L formats for displaying the byte content of doubles and floats.