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In computer science, type conversion, [1] [2] type casting, [1] [3] type coercion, [3] and type juggling [4] [5] are different ways of changing an expression from one data type to another. An example would be the conversion of an integer value into a floating point value or its textual representation as a string, and vice versa.
Integer addition, for example, can be performed as a single machine instruction, and some offer specific instructions to process sequences of characters with a single instruction. [7] But the choice of primitive data type may affect performance, for example it is faster using SIMD operations and data types to operate on an array of floats.
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.
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 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.
The C++ standard library provides a complex template class as well as complex-math functions in the <complex> header. The Go programming language has built-in types complex64 (each component is 32-bit float) and complex128 (each component is 64-bit float). Imaginary number literals can be specified by appending an "i".
Fast Half Float Conversions; Analog Devices variant (four-bit exponent) C source code to convert between IEEE double, single, and half precision can be found here; Java source code for half-precision floating-point conversion; Half precision floating point for one of the extended GCC features
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.