Advantages and Disadvantages of Floating-Point Numbers
Floating-point numbers have two advantages over integers. First, they can represent values between integers. Second, because of the scaling factor, they can represent a much greater range of values. On the other hand, floating point operations usually are slightly slower than integer operations, and you can lose precision. Listing 3.9 illustrates the last point.
// fltadd.cpp -- precision problems with float#include <iostream>int main(){ using namespace std; float a = 2.34E+22f; float b = a + 1.0f; cout << "a = " << a << endl; cout << "b - a = " << b - a << endl; return 0;}
The program in Listing 3.9 takes a number, adds 1, and then subtracts the ...
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