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The C language provides the four basic arithmetic type specifiers char, int, float and double (as well as the boolean type bool), and the modifiers signed, unsigned, short, and long. The following table lists the permissible combinations in specifying a large set of storage size-specific declarations.
Conversely, precision can be lost when converting representations from integer to floating-point, since a floating-point type may be unable to exactly represent all possible values of some integer type. For example, float might be an IEEE 754 single precision type, which cannot represent the integer 16777217 exactly, while a 32-bit integer type ...
A floating-point number is a rational number, because it can be represented as one integer divided by another; for example 1.45 × 10 3 is (145/100)×1000 or 145,000 /100. The base determines the fractions that can be represented; for instance, 1/5 cannot be represented exactly as a floating-point number using a binary base, but 1/5 can be ...
The design of floating-point format allows various optimisations, resulting from the easy generation of a base-2 logarithm approximation from an integer view of the raw bit pattern. Integer arithmetic and bit-shifting can yield an approximation to reciprocal square root (fast inverse square root), commonly required in computer graphics.
C mathematical operations are a group of functions in the standard library of the C programming language implementing basic mathematical functions. [1] [2] All functions use floating-point numbers in one manner or another. Different C standards provide different, albeit backwards-compatible, sets of functions.
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]
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.
In many C compilers the float data type, for example, is represented in 32 bits, in accord with the IEEE specification for single-precision floating point numbers. They will thus use floating-point-specific microprocessor operations on those values (floating-point addition, multiplication, etc.).