Thread: Float Division question

I was writing a program where two integer values needed to be divided so i assigned both of them to a float variable and casted them to (float), so i did this:

```

float average = (float) wordcount / (float) lettercount;

```
Unfortunately this gave me a wrong answer when dividing both of these integer values casted to floats using (float). But then I changed up my code and did this:

```

printf ( "%f", ( ( (float) wordcount) / ( (float) lettercount) ) );

```
This bottom line seemed to work and gave me the correct float value, my question is, why did the top line not give me the correct answer, and why did the bottom line work. I would have thought the top line is a float and all operands are being casted to float so there is no precedence issues of what is calculated first?

Also could you please recommend me an article or anything so i can further deepen my knowledge on data type arithmetic, thank you.

Post some actual compilable code showing both test cases.

The second one likely used double instead of float to store the result.

Tim S.

Originally Posted by butcher47

I was writing a program where two integer values needed to be divided so i assigned both of them to a float variable and casted them to (float), so i did this:

```


```
Unfortunately this gave me a wrong answer when dividing both of these integer values casted to floats using (float).

Should be fine. Almost certainly you have an error elsewhere
in the code. For example when printing the result out.