The accepted answer is 100% without question WRONG. Not halfway wrong or even slightly wrong. I fear this issue is going to confuse and mislead programmers for a long time to come when this question pops up in searches. NaN is designed to propagate through all calculations, infecting them like a virus, so if somewhere … Read more
Note: the Nintendo 64 does have a 64-bit processor, however: Many games took advantage of the chip’s 32-bit processing mode as the greater data precision available with 64-bit data types is not typically required by 3D games, as well as the fact that processing 64-bit data uses twice as much RAM, cache, and bandwidth, thereby … Read more
In most programming languages, floating point numbers are represented a lot like scientific notation: with an exponent and a mantissa (also called the significand). A very simple number, say 9.2, is actually this fraction: 5179139571476070 * 2 -49 Where the exponent is -49 and the mantissa is 5179139571476070. The reason it is impossible to represent … Read more
I was a member of the IEEE-754 committee, I’ll try to help clarify things a bit. First off, floating-point numbers are not real numbers, and floating-point arithmetic does not satisfy the axioms of real arithmetic. Trichotomy is not the only property of real arithmetic that does not hold for floats, nor even the most important. … Read more
Because floats and doubles cannot accurately represent the base 10 multiples that we use for money. This issue isn’t just for Java, it’s for any programming language that uses base 2 floating-point types. In base 10, you can write 10.25 as 1025 * 10-2 (an integer times a power of 10). IEEE-754 floating-point numbers are … Read more