Quiz submission record for quiz3-2-1 at Wed Jul  7 10:46:41 2004:

Your Answer for Question 1:
Someone could exploit this by hiding instructions inside other types of data that would get executed and run malicious code on the system. One possible technique to prevent this is to represent instructions is strong typing, like in Java. With strong typing, you wouldn't confuse numbers with instructions and then if someone tried to imbed instructions inside an overflow of a number, the machine would see it and know that it's just a number.

Your Answer for Question 2:
A subnormal (denormalized number) is a number which has the same exponent as zero, but a non-zero significand. They allow even more precision from a floating point number, so that there is no gap between 0 and the smallest normalized number.

Your Answer for Question 3:
Because floating-point addition was associative, and floating-point numbers have limited precision, better precision would be achieved by (0.5 - x) + 0.5 than if one used 1.0 - x.

Your Answer for Question 4:
For: The standard is widely implemented.
Against: The standard is very difficult to implement correctly. Also, one could possibly create a new, better standard that is easy to implement. Most standards change frequently.


Your unique submission ID is quiz3-2-1-cs61c-ep-1089222401-539.