Floating Point Numbers

All numbers with decimal points are considered floating point numbers, like 3.14, -2.5, or even 3.0 and 0.0. They are different from integers in that they CAN contain decimal points, since they are stored fundamentally differently in memory.

Type Inference

C automatically infers the type of number literals.

Any number without a decimal point will be inferred as an int, e.g. 3, -10.

Any number with a decimal point value will be inferred as a double, which is essentially a float but has more precision (and also takes up more space in memory), e.g. 4.15, -0.24.

Any number with a decimal point value, and with a lower case letter f at the end will be inferred as a float value, e.g. 3.14f, -0.0f.

Scientific Notation

Say we wish to write a number in scientific notation, e.g. 3.14 * 10^8, we can write the number 3.14E8 in C to give it to a variable.

Note that a number in scientific notation is by default a double (this even applies when the mantissa, or the number part, does not contain decimals, like 3E4).

If we want to write a number in scientific notation of type float, we again have to add the letter f at the end of the number, e.g. 3.14E4f.

In summary, the mantissa can be any decimal number, while the exponent can only be an integer. Negative exponents are also okay, e.g. 6.62607E-34.

Implicit Type Conversion

When you assign an integer to a float or double variable, it will be automatically converted to float or double, retaining the same value, like so:

int i = 123;
float f = i;  // f is assigned the value 123.0f
double d = i; // d is assigned the value 123.0

However, when you assign a float or double number to an int variable, it will also be automatically converted, but the decimal part will be simply cut off, resulting in loss of accuracy.

float f = 123.123f;
double d = 321.98;

int i = f;  // i is assigned 123
int i = d;  // d is assigned 321, note that there is no rounding!

Also, since an int can only store number in range $[-2^{31},~ 2^{31}-1]$ or from -2147483648 to 2147483647, if an int is assigned a value out of this range, the value of it will be overflow and be erroneous. Depending on the system, it can either be the minimum possible number, the maximum possible number, or some random number.

double d = 3E20;
int i = d;  // The value of i will be erroneous!

This potential issue is an example of an **implementation-dependent issue**, and can damage software portability.

Other Common Implicit Type Conversions (done automatically at run time, when evaluating expressions):

Data of type char or short int will be converted to type int (this is called an integer promotion);
If there is any value of type float in the expression, the other data will be converted to float;
If there’s any value of type double in the expression, the other data will be converted to double;
If there’s any value of type long int in the expression, the other data will be converted to long int.

Precision

Since a float value in C is only stored in 4 bytes (32 bits), it has only finite precision, specifically, it can only guarantee that a number is precise up to 8 digits.

And since a double value is stored in 8 bytes (64 bits), its precision is higher than float, specifically it can guarantee that a number is precise up to around 16 digits.

To demonstrate, we can use the code below:

float x = 1111111111111111111.1111111111111111111;
double y = 1111111111111111111.1111111111111111111;

printf("x = %f\ny = %f\n", x, y);
// This will print out:
// x = 1111111131851653120.000000
// y = 1111111111111111168.000000

Thus if we add a large float value to a small float value, say for example 11111111000.00 + 0.00011111111, the following will occur:

float x = 11111111000.00 + 0.00011111111;
printf("%f", x);
// This will print out:
// 11111110656.000000

This is called a numerical anomaly, and is cause by the finite precision of floating point variables.

Explicit Type Conversions

In contrast to implicit type conversions, which are automatic and done at run time, explicit type conversions are carried out at the developer’s request. And it is done explicitly through the typecast operator ((type) value).

For example, in the following code, the float variable is being explicitly converted into a double:

float x;
double y;

y = (double) x;