Imagesource: https://evanw.github.io/

Whoever deals with 8-bit architectures and gets beyond the first text output (Hello world 🤹🏻‍♂️), addition and subtraction, will sooner or later end up with the topic of floating point arithmetic.

And if the beloved piece of silicon doesn't have a corresponding floating point unit in hardware, the dazed aspirant has no other choice than to implement the whole thing in software.

In principle, this is not as difficult as it sounds at first. Once you understand the concept of representing floating point numbers in binary, operations on those are not too far away.

A wonderful little tool to create just this understanding has recently been put online by Evan Wallace.

His Float Toy visualizes 16, 32 and 64 bit floating point numbers and their binary representation right in the browser.

Great starting point!