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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.
A floating-point variable can represent a wider range of numbers than a fixed-point variable of the same bit width at the cost of precision. A signed 32-bit integer variable has a maximum value of 2 31 − 1 = 2,147,483,647, whereas an IEEE 754 32-bit base-2 floating-point variable has a maximum value of (2 − 2 −23) × 2 127 ≈ 3.4028235 ...
Usually, the 32-bit and 64-bit IEEE 754 binary floating-point formats are used for float and double respectively. 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.
To approximate the greater range and precision of real numbers, we have to abandon signed integers and fixed-point numbers and go to a "floating-point" format. In the decimal system, we are familiar with floating-point numbers of the form (scientific notation): 1.1030402 × 10 5 = 1.1030402 × 100000 = 110304.02. or, more compactly: 1.1030402E5
Value types do not support subtyping, but may support other forms of implicit type conversion, e.g. automatically converting an integer to a floating-point number if needed. Additionally, there may be implicit conversions between certain value and reference types, e.g. "boxing" a primitive int (a value type) into an Integer object (an object ...
The value distribution is similar to floating point, but the value-to-representation curve (i.e., the graph of the logarithm function) is smooth (except at 0). Conversely to floating-point arithmetic, in a logarithmic number system multiplication, division and exponentiation are simple to implement, but addition and subtraction are complex.
However, supposing that floating-point comparisons are expensive, and also supposing that float is represented according to the IEEE floating-point standard, and integers are 32 bits wide, we could engage in type punning to extract the sign bit of the floating-point number using only integer operations:
For floating-point types, this is ignored. float arguments are always promoted to double when used in a varargs call. [19] ll: For integer types, causes printf to expect a long long-sized integer argument. L: For floating-point types, causes printf to expect a long double argument. z: For integer types, causes printf to expect a size_t-sized ...