scope:

This document specifies properties of many of the integer and oating point datatypes available in a variety of programming languages in common use for mathematical and numerical applications. It is not the purpose of this document to ensure that an arbitrary numerical function can be so encoded as to produce acceptable results on all conforming datatypes. Rather, the goal is to ensure that the properties of the arithmetic on a conforming datatype are made available to the programmer. Therefore, it is not reasonable to demand that a substantive piece of software run on every implementation that can claim conformity to this document. An implementor may choose any combination of hardware and software support to meet the specifications of this document. It is the datatypes and operations on values of those datatypes, of the computing environment as seen by the programmer/user, that does or does not conform to the specifications. The term implementation (of this document) denotes the total computing environment pertinent to this document, including hardware, language processors, subroutine libraries, exception handling facilities, other software, and documentation.