Extension:BCmath/Glossary



Glossary for BCmath is a list of core terms and concepts for bcmath, or arbitrary-precision arithmetic.

Terms and concepts

 * Arbitrary precision
 * When calculations are not limited by specific register sizes it is referred to as arbitrary precision.
 * Wikipedia: Arbitrary-precision


 * Infinity (∞)
 * Infinite numbers are valid numbers that are represented with a particular Unicode symbol, the infinity (U+221E) codepoint.
 * An infinite number can have a sign, bot a plus infinity (+∞) and a minus infinity (-∞).
 * Wikipedia: Infinity


 * NaN
 * Not-a-Number is the value of a calculation that has no valid representation as a number.
 * Wikipedia: NaN


 * Scale
 * The scale is how the number is shifted to process it efficiently.
 * The BCmath extension tries to estimate the scale factor if it is missing.
 * PHP:bcscale