Path: utzoo!utgpu!attcan!uunet!lll-winken!lll-tis!helios.ee.lbl.gov!pasteur!ucbvax!lti.UUCP!reg From: reg@lti.UUCP (Rick Genter x18) Newsgroups: comp.lang.c Subject: float vs. double Message-ID: <8808092015.AA26033@pepperell.lti.com> Date: 9 Aug 88 20:15:23 GMT Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU Organization: The Internet Lines: 9 I understand that dpANS C requires that sizeof (float) <= sizeof (double). However, does it state anywhere that a double should provide greater *precision* than a float, or for that matter that casting a float to a double (or vice versa) shouldn't raise a hardware exception? I can envision a situation where sizeof (float) == sizeof (double), the difference being that floats trade off mantissa bits for exponent bits. I believe the VAX architecture provides this. - reg