quzah seems to take my posts as a personal affront on his person. It is not.

I was making a clarification on the
(basically twice (double) as big)
part of the statement that emeyer made. Because it was neither entirely correct nor entirely descriptive (since the range of the exponent is also larger in an IEEE double vs. an IEEE float), I decided to clarify some things. I don't want to get in to a full dissertation on the various floating point formats, nor the details of floating point manipulation. There have been, in the past, many different floating point representations. I'm sticking with IEEE for this discussion.

As for reading the standards -- I participated in the creation of the ANSI C89 standard while working at a C compiler company. I have written IEEE, Dec-Vax, and Motorolla "fast" floating point code, in assembler and C. I have copies of the publications in which the format is formalized. I've written the documentation on these floating point representations that shipped with the programmers guide for a commercial compiler.

And you get a little more than double the precision (53 vs. 24 bits of mantissa), and (because it's exponential) much more than double the range (10 bits vs. 8 bits of exponent) with an IEEE double vs. IEEE float representation.

In making my posting that quzah finds so absurd, I simply wanted to give emeyer a better example of the difference between float and double, and maybe encourage him to be more precise in his language. As a professional programmer, I know how important knowing this sort of knowlege is in avoiding difficult to locate coding errors in scientific and financial programs. (Financial programs do not, as a rule, use floating point at all for money calculations or storage; they tend to use fixed point to avoid rouding problems and other boundary conditions.)

I wrote my post to help emeyer, not pretend to have a point where I have none. quzah may choose to take issue with what I say; that's his right -- but that does not make my statements wrong.