floating-point standard, the most popular abstraction for dealing with approximate real numbers, uses a form of saturation in which overflow is converted into "infinity" or "negative infinity", and any other operation on this result continues to produce the same value. This has the advantage over simple saturation that later operations decreasing the value will not end up producing a misleadingly "reasonable" result, such as in the computation . Alternatively, there may be special states such as "exponent overflow" (and "exponent underflow") that will similarly persist through subsequent operations, or cause immediate termination, or be tested for as in IF ACCUMULATOR OVERFLOW ... as in FORTRAN for the IBM704 (October 1956). See also Censoring (statistics) Notes References External links SARITH: Safe ARITHmetic – A Progress Report: Report on a saturation arithmetic component for Eiffel. saturating, a header-only C++ library for saturating arithmethic in terms of GCC Overflow builtins. Computer arithmetic