Bell Labs researcher Frank Gray introduced the term reflected binary code in his 1947 patent application,

remarking that the code had "as yet no recognized name".[1] He derived the name from the fact that it "may be built up from the conventional binary code by a sort of reflection process". The code was later named after Gray by others who used it. Two different 1953 patent applications give "Gray code" as an alternative name for the "reflected binary code";[2][3] one of those also lists "minimum error code" and "cyclic permutation code" among the names.[3] A 1954 patent application refers to "the Bell Telephone Gray code".[4] Dec Gray Binary 0 000 000 1 001 001 2 011 010 3 010 011 4 110 100 5 111 101 6 101 110 7 100 111 Excess 3 Gray Code In many applications, it is desirable to have a code that is BCD as well as unit distance. A unit distance code derives its name from the fact that there is only one bit change between two consecutive numbers. The excess 3 gray code is such a code, the values for zero and nine differ in only 1 bit, and so do all values for successive numbers. Outputs from linear devices or angular encoders may be coded in excess 3 gray code to obtain multi-digit BCD numbers. In computing, floating point describes a method of representing real numbers in a way that can support a wide range of values. Numbers are, in general, represented approximately to a fixed number of significant digits and scaled using an exponent. The base for the scaling is normally 2, 10 or 16. The typical number that can be represented exactly is of the form: Significant digits baseexponent The term floating point refers to the fact that the radix point (decimal point, or, more commonly in computers, binary point) can "float"; that is, it can be placed anywhere relative to the significant digits of the number. This position is indicated separately in the internal representation, and floating-point representation can thus be thought of as a computer realization of scientific notation. Over the years, a variety of floating-point representations have been used in computers. However, since the 1990s, the most commonly encountered representation is that defined by the IEEE 754 Standard. The advantage of floating-point representation over fixed-point and integer representation is that it can support a much wider range of values. For example, a fixed-point representation that has seven decimal digits with two decimal places can represent the numbers 12345.67, 123.45, 1.23 and so on, whereas a floating-point representation (such as the IEEE 754 decimal32 format) with seven decimal digits could in addition represent 1.234567, 123456.7, 0.00001234567, 1234567000000000, and so on. The floating-point format needs slightly more storage (to encode the position of the radix point), so when stored in the same space, floating-point numbers achieve their greater range at the expense of precision.To introduce floating point representation, we first consider fixed point representation. When representing integers we assume the decimal (or binary) point is to the right of the rightmost digit. Thus 12 is 12. (the decimal point is to the right of the 12). Using an unsigned 8 bit binary representation, 12 would be represented by 00001100. If we shift the binary point to the left say by four positions, we could represent fractional values. For example 12.5 would be represented by 1100.1000 (note that digits below the binary point are powers of = 2-1). 5.75 would be represented by 0101.1100 (since the fractional part 0.75 equals 2-1 or plus 2-2 or ). This is called fixed point representation. The binary point is assumed to be fixed between two of the digits or bits. In the above example we reduced the range of numbers that can be represented (the largest integer we can represent is 1111.0000 = 15decimal) but allow fractions to be represented (0000.0001 = 0.0625decimal is the smallest fraction that can be represented). The mechanics are not much different from the more familiar binary integer representations weve already considered (and neither is the underlying computer hardware used to perform arithmetic and logical operations).