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Information about the actual properties, such as size, of the basic arithmetic types, is provided via macro constants in two headers: <limits.h> header (climits header in C++) defines macros for integer types and <float.h> header (cfloat header in C++) defines macros for floating-point types. The actual values depend on the implementation.
C and C++ perform such promotion for objects of Boolean, character, wide character, enumeration, and short integer types which are promoted to int, and for objects of type float, which are promoted to double. Unlike some other type conversions, promotions never lose precision or modify the value stored in the object. In Java:
NOTE C does not specify a radix for float, double, and long double. An implementation can choose the representation of float, double, and long double to be the same as the decimal floating types. [2] Despite that, the radix has historically been binary (base 2), meaning numbers like 1/2 or 1/4 are exact, but not 1/10, 1/100 or 1/3.
An exception is Microsoft Visual C++ for x86, which makes long double a synonym for double. [2] The Intel C++ compiler on Microsoft Windows supports extended precision, but requires the /Qlong‑double switch for long double to correspond to the hardware's extended precision format. [3] Compilers may also use long double for the IEEE 754 ...
The set of basic C data types is similar to Java's. Minimally, there are four types, char, int, float, and double, but the qualifiers short, long, signed, and unsigned mean that C contains numerous target-dependent integer and floating-point primitive types. [15]
A double (eight bytes) will be 8-byte aligned. A long long (eight bytes) will be 8-byte aligned. A long double (eight bytes with Visual C++, sixteen bytes with GCC) will be 8-byte aligned with Visual C++ and 16-byte aligned with GCC. Any pointer (eight bytes) will be 8-byte aligned. Some data types are dependent on the implementation.
The type-generic macros that correspond to a function that is defined for only real numbers encapsulates a total of 3 different functions: float, double and long double variants of the function. The C++ language includes native support for function overloading and thus does not provide the <tgmath.h> header even as a compatibility feature.
In addition to the assumption about bit-representation of floating-point numbers, the above floating-point type-punning example also violates the C language's constraints on how objects are accessed: [3] the declared type of x is float but it is read through an expression of type unsigned int.