1. A system for performing floating point arithmetic operations, the system comprising: an input register adapted for receiving an operand; a mechanism for: performing a masking or shift operation on the operand in response to determining that the operand is in an un-normalized format to make the operand equivalent to a normalized truncated operand; performing single precision incrementing of the operand in response to determining that the operand is single precision, that the operand requires the incrementing based on the results of the previous operation and that the previous operation did not perform the incrementing; and performing double precision incrementing of the operand in response to determining that the operand is double precision, that the operand requires the incrementing based on the results of the previous operation and that the previous operation did not perform the incrementing.