Tag Archives: double

Exceptional Floating Point

Posted on April 21, 2012 by brucedawson

Floating-point math has an answer for everything, but sometimes that’s not what you want. Sometimes instead of getting an answer to the question sqrt(-1.0) (it’s NaN) it’s better to know that your software is asking imaginary questions. The IEEE standard … Continue reading →

Posted in AltDevBlogADay, Floating Point, Programming | Tagged , , , , | 24 Comments

Intermediate Floating-Point Precision

Posted on March 21, 2012 by brucedawson

Riddle me this Batman: how much precision are these calculations evaluated at? If you answered ‘double’ and ‘float’ then you score one point for youthful idealism, but zero points for correctness. The correct answer, for zero-idealism points and forty two … Continue reading →

Posted in AltDevBlogADay, Floating Point, Programming, Visual Studio | Tagged , , , , , | 43 Comments

Float Precision–From Zero to 100+ Digits

Posted on March 8, 2012 by brucedawson

How much precision does a float have? It depends on the float, and it depends on what you mean by precision. Typical reasonable answers range from 6-9 decimal digits, but it turns out that you can make a case for … Continue reading →

Posted in AltDevBlogADay, Floating Point, Programming | Tagged , , , , , | 52 Comments

Comparing Floating Point Numbers, 2012 Edition

Posted on February 25, 2012 by brucedawson

This post is a more carefully thought out and peer reviewed version of a floating-point comparison article I wrote many years ago. This one gives solid advice and some surprising observations about the tricky subject of comparing floating-point numbers. A … Continue reading →

Posted in AltDevBlogADay, Floating Point, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , | 181 Comments

Don’t Store That in a Float

Posted on February 13, 2012 by brucedawson

I promised in my last post to show an example of the importance of knowing how much precision a float has at a particular value. Here goes. As a general rule this type of data should never be stored in … Continue reading →

Posted in AltDevBlogADay, Floating Point, Programming | Tagged , , , , , , | 27 Comments