Bug?

Richard O'Keefe ok at cs.mu.oz.au
Fri Oct 13 16:04:23 AEST 1989


In article <10895 at riks.csl.sony.co.jp>, diamond at csl.sony.co.jp (Norman Diamond) writes:
> Sorry Mr. Koenig, it's easy to imagine.  Every hardware floating-point
> system and most software ones have situations where (a-b)==0 but a != b.

My understanding is that IEEE denormalised numbers were introduced
precisely so that subtracting one finite number from another would
yield zero ONLY when the two numbers were equal.

Of course most other floating-point systems haven't got denormalised
numbers, and some systems which use IEEE formats don't obey IEEE rules.



More information about the Comp.lang.c mailing list