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Showing posts with the label Ariane 5

Programming in C - Chapter II - It Really IS Rocket Science

Problems arise with numerical expression in computing. In reality, there are an infinite number of real numbers. However there is clearly not an infinite amount of infinite memory even in the largest of super-computers, and memory that is addressable by an application is only a fraction of the total finite available memory. How to we deal with these obstacles? We will explain more in a moment. First let's overview in more detail how the C compiler handles numeral types. Consider the application below: #include <stdio.h> int main (void) {     float f = 1 / 10;     printf("%.2f\n", f);     return 0; } Here we declare a float, 1/10 which should clearly resolve to 0.1 or 0.10 since I am declaring that printf provide a float with two digits after the decimal point. However, upon complation and excecution the program will stubbornly return a value of "0.00". Why? The issue is that I am declaring a float as an operation of two integers - 1 and