1. A computing system that calculates an exponent portion of a floating point data type, for use in calculating powers of two in a computer language processing environment supporting a union declaration functionality and a left shift functionality, comprising: an input receptive of an exponent value; a bias application module that biases the exponent value based on a selected precision of a floating point data type; a storage module that stores the exponent value in a storage variable having a size determined based on the selected precision; a left shift application module that shifts the exponent value left by a number of bits determined based on the selected precision; and an output that returns the storage variable as the floating point data type having the selected precision.