Virtual Machine

Hello /prague/

I'm working on implementing a virtual machine of my own design. I started by writing the ALU, and I decided that it should operate on 32 bit words. It allows for many of the basic functions (NOT, AND, OR, XOR, >>, <<, +, -, *, /).

I am entirely new to designing machines (I'm a college sophomore.) and I ran into the problem of representation of floating point data. Is this implemented directly into the hardware of computers, or does software manipulate words to create floating point number manipulation higher up?

>>3
Thank you. I just did some reading on IEEE 754, and it seems like that would be fairly easy to imitate.

Here is my only concern. My ALU takes two words and a byte representation of any of the above functions and performs that function upon the two words. How would the ALU distinguish between floating-point data and non-floating-point data? Would I have to write sets of functions for each and rely on the processor to send the right data to the ALU?