In the IEEE 754 standard, what components make up the floating-point representation of a number?

In the IEEE 754 standard, a floating-point number is represented by three components:

1. Sign bit: This is the first bit of the representation. If the sign bit is 0, the number is positive. If it's 1, the number is negative.

2. Exponent: The next several bits represent the exponent, which is used to express the number in scientific notation. The number of bits used for the exponent varies depending on whether the representation is single-precision (8 bits for the exponent) or double-precision (11 bits for the exponent).

3. Mantissa or Significand: The remaining bits represent the mantissa, also known as the significand. This is the actual fraction part of the number in the scientific notation.

These three components work together to represent a wide range of real numbers in a standardized, efficient way.