From: utzoo!decvax!duke!harpo!npoiv!alice!rabbit!ark Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards Title: Re: Floating Point and Other Such Mysteries Article-I.D.: rabbit.757 Posted: Sun Sep 19 10:42:40 1982 Received: Tue Sep 21 03:57:57 1982 References: sri-unix.3338 The trouble with saying that an expression is float unless some wider context needs it as double is that then when you see a + b and a and b are both float, you don't know the true meaning of +. It seems a bad idea in general to make the interpretation of an expression depend on its context.