http://www.perlmonks.org?node_id=781353


in reply to [Win32, C, and way OT] C floats, doubles, and their equivalence

Seems like the conversion glitch could be happening at several places.

Maybe the initial assignment of float foo needs a cast. MSVC warns about loss of precision in such cases -- maybe it's serious. :)

float foo = (float)nv;

As a workaround, perhaps you could truncate the initial assignment of the double:

double nv = (float)(2.0 / 3);

Lastly, maybe something is awry in the conversions that are being done during the comparison -- like it's ignoring your cast. It's a stab in the dark, but maybe a hack like this would get it to pay attention:

static __inline int compare_truncated_double_to_float(double d, float f) { float truncted_double = (float)d; if (f == truncated_double) { return 1; } else { return 0; } }

PS: This is relevant to the work I do ensuring Windows compatibility for my XS distros.

--
Marvin Humphrey

Replies are listed 'Best First'.
Re^2: [Win32, C, and way OT] C floats, doubles, and their equivalence
by syphilis (Archbishop) on Jul 19, 2009 at 00:12 UTC
    It's a stab in the dark ...

    Good stab - I can make use of that. The following outputs "True False" on the buggy compilers (and "True True" on sane compilers):
    #include <stdio.h> int main(void) { double nv = 2.0 / 3; float foo = 2.0 / 3; float truncated = (float)nv; if(foo == truncated) printf("True "); else printf("False "); if(foo == (float)nv) printf("True\n"); else printf("False\n"); return 0; }
    I can apply that method (used to obtain that "True") to PDL, which solves the problem I have asked about. Unfortunately, while it enables me to get the behaviour I want with my C demo scripts, it's still not producing the correct result with PDL - but this is such a fickle bug. I'll have to play around with it some more.

    PS: This is relevant to the work I do ensuring Windows compatibility for my XS distros

    #if defined _MSC_VER && _MSC_VER < 1400 then expect weirdness if you start comparing floats with doubles.

    Thanks Marvin.

    Cheers,
    Rob