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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 ...
Double-precision floating-point format (sometimes called FP64 or float64) is a floating-point number format, usually occupying 64 bits in computer memory; it represents a wide range of numeric values by using a floating radix point. Double precision may be chosen when the range or precision of single precision would be insufficient.
The C99 standard includes new real floating-point types float_t and double_t, defined in <math.h>. They correspond to the types used for the intermediate results of floating-point expressions when FLT_EVAL_METHOD is 0, 1, or 2. These types may be wider than long double. C99 also added complex types: float _Complex, double _Complex, long double ...
On x86 and x86-64, the most common C/C++ compilers implement long double as either 80-bit extended precision (e.g. the GNU C Compiler gcc [13] and the Intel C++ Compiler with a /Qlong‑double switch [14]) or simply as being synonymous with double precision (e.g. Microsoft Visual C++ [15]), rather than as quadruple precision.
Variable-length arithmetic operations are considerably slower than fixed-length format floating-point instructions. When high performance is not a requirement, but high precision is, variable length arithmetic can prove useful, though the actual accuracy of the result may not be known.
If the variable has a signed integer type, a program may make the assumption that a variable always contains a positive value. An integer overflow can cause the value to wrap and become negative, which violates the program's assumption and may lead to unexpected behavior (for example, 8-bit integer addition of 127 + 1 results in −128, a two's ...
Uninitialized variables are a particular problem in languages such as assembly language, C, and C++, which were designed for systems programming. The development of these languages involved a design philosophy in which conflicts between performance and safety were generally resolved in favor of performance.
A basic example is in the argv argument to the main function in C (and C++), which is given in the prototype as char **argv—this is because the variable argv itself is a pointer to an array of strings (an array of arrays), so *argv is a pointer to the 0th string (by convention the name of the program), and **argv is the 0th character of the ...