Floating-point numbers in LabVIEW conform to the ANSI/IEEE Standard 754-1985. There are three types of floating-point numbers.
![]() | Extended-precision (EXT)When you save extended-precision numbers to disk, LabVIEW stores them in a platform-independent 128-bit format, which is the same as the Sun in-memory format. In memory, the size and precision vary depending on the platform. Refer to the Numeric Data Types Table for more information about numeric data type bits, digits, and range. |
![]() | Double-precision (DBL)Double-precision floating-point numbers have 64-bit IEEE double-precision format. Double-precision is the default format for numeric objects. |
![]() | Single-precision (SGL)Single-precision floating-point numbers have 32-bit IEEE single-precision format. |
For most situations, use double-precision floating-point numbers. Use single-precision floating-point numbers when memory savings are important and you will not overflow the range of the numbers. Use extended-precision floating-point numbers only when necessary. The performance and precision of extended-precision arithmetic vary among platforms.
Data Acquisition VIs often return arrays of floating-point numbers.