scope:

It is intended that an implementation of a floating-point system conforming to this standard can be realized entirely in software, entirely in hardware, or in any combination of software and hardware. It is the environment that the programmer or user of the system sees that conforms or fails to conform to this standard. Hardware components that require software support to conform shall not be said to conform apart from such software. This standard specifies: basic and extended floating-point number formats; add, substract, multiplty, divide, square root, remainder and compare operations; conversions between integer and floating-point formats; conversions between basic format floating-point numbers and decimal strings, and floating-point exceptions and their handling, including non-numbers.