Their number range is limited to the values indicated below. The advantage of integer numbers is their fast processing and that there are no rounding-off errors. Floating point numbers are numbers with decimal places. If the number range of the fraction is not sufficient, each exponent is increased by one, and the fraction is shifted one place to the right. However, the number of digits always remains identical.
Disadvantages are the rounding-off errors possible with floating point numbers.
Not all real numbers can be exactly represented by a float number. Since the PowerPC has a very powerful floating point computation unit, these types of numbers can have an even greater computation speed than integer numbers. A string is a character string, that is, a text of up to 2147483648 characters in length. The text can contain any characters from 0 to 255. Strings should only be used if the problem cannot be solved equally well using integers because in spite of the highly optimized management of strings, their use is never as fast as the work with integers.