Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!rutgers!mailrus!ames!pasteur!ucbvax!UICVM!U23405
From: U23405@UICVM (Michael J. Steiner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c
Subject: re: should double have better precision or greater range?
Message-ID: <8809061831.AA29128@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU>
Date: 28 Aug 88 15:46:25 GMT
Sender: daemon@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU
Organization: The Internet
Lines: 26

I may go as far as to say that there should be two kinds of doubles, one
with better precision and another with greater range. They could be called
something like "acdouble" and "widouble" standing for "accurate double"
and "wide double" respectively. I can't really choose between the two
because whether a programmer would want to use an accurate double or a wide
double would depend on what kind of application he is doing.

Also, I recently heard of a "long double". Since double is defined as
"long float", this would mean "long long float", which is confusing.
As far as I know, C doesn't allow this. (It would be nice, though, to make
a data type as long as you want by saying "long long long long ... <type>")
Anyone hear about this?

One last thing: Would an expression be evaluated more quickly if the RHS
had variables of type short or type int? For example, which would be faster:

          int a, b, c;
          a = b * c - (int) 4;

          int a; short b, c;
          a = b * c - (short) 4;

                                                 Michael Steiner
P.S. Thanks for the help with                    Email: U23405@UICVM.BITNET
sorting algorithms and "IF
STATEMENT EFFICIENCY".