Arithmetic Exceptions

One of the most difficult things in programming is to treat exceptional situations. It is desirable that a program handles exceptional data in a manner consistent with the handling of normal data. The results will then provide the user with the information needed to debug the code, if an exception occurred. The extra FP numbers allowed by the IEEE standard are meant to help handling such situations.

The IEEE standard defines 5 exception types: division by 0, overflow, underflow, invalid operation and inexact operation.