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Because floating-point numbers have limited precision, only a subset of real or rational numbers are exactly representable; other numbers can be represented only approximately. Many languages have both a single precision (often called float ) and a double precision type (often called double ).
But if exact values for large factorials are desired, then special software is required, as in the pseudocode that follows, which implements the classic algorithm to calculate 1, 1×2, 1×2×3, 1×2×3×4, etc. the successive factorial numbers.
Python supports normal floating point numbers, which are created when a dot is used in a literal (e.g. 1.1), when an integer and a floating point number are used in an expression, or as a result of some mathematical operations ("true division" via the / operator, or exponentiation with a negative exponent).
Generally, var, var, or var is how variable names or other non-literal values to be interpreted by the reader are represented. The rest is literal code. Guillemets (« and ») enclose optional sections.
Since 2 10 = 1024, the complete range of the positive normal floating-point numbers in this format is from 2 −1022 ≈ 2 × 10 −308 to approximately 2 1024 ≈ 2 × 10 308. The number of normal floating-point numbers in a system (B, P, L, U) where B is the base of the system, P is the precision of the significand (in base B),
Real floating-point type, usually mapped to an extended precision floating-point number format. Actual properties unspecified. Actual properties unspecified. It can be either x86 extended-precision floating-point format (80 bits, but typically 96 bits or 128 bits in memory with padding bytes ), the non-IEEE " double-double " (128 bits), IEEE ...
Single precision is termed REAL in Fortran; [1] SINGLE-FLOAT in Common Lisp; [2] float in C, C++, C# and Java; [3] Float in Haskell [4] and Swift; [5] and Single in Object Pascal , Visual Basic, and MATLAB. However, float in Python, Ruby, PHP, and OCaml and single in versions of Octave before 3.2 refer to double-precision numbers.
Some programming languages provide a built-in (primitive) rational data type to represent rational numbers like 1/3 and −11/17 without rounding, and to do arithmetic on them. Examples are the ratio type of Common Lisp , and analogous types provided by most languages for algebraic computation , such as Mathematica and Maple .